Since you view IE regularly, you are not only intelligent, attractive and successful, you know what to expect from Warcraft 2. For months now, we've been telling you it's going to be just like Warcraft, only more so: more units, resources, buildings, pixels (it's SVGA), terrain types, players (up to 8 on a LAN) and theaters of war (you now have land, sea, and air units).
Now get this: that doesn't even BEGIN to convey how good this game actually is. The amount of polish Blizzard has applied just in the two months since their press beta is amazing!
The way this game runs under Windows 95 puts most recent DOS releases to shame. It's clear that the designers put a lot of effort into making installation painless. You stick the disc in your CD-ROM drive, and it prompts you to install the game, then prompts you to run it thereafter ù just like a true Win95 game. One caveat: the game requires a VESA driver, and certain graphics cards which are not VESA-friendly may cause difficulties. On one machine I use, which has an older Matrox Windows accelerator card, the game wouldn't run because I couldn't get it to recognize either a native VESA driver or UNIVBE (which is included with the game, and should work with the vast majority of cards out there). Fortunately, this problem should affect relatively few people.
Warcraft was a well-rounded game, but Warcraft 2 feels much more polished. I always took umbrage at having to tell a unit what to do when, in many cases, it should be obvious: if you tell a peon to go to a gold mine, you want him to harvest gold. Warcraft 2 lets you right-click to quickly dispatch your units. Click on clear ground and you move there. Click on an enemy unit and you will attack him. If you've been playing a lot of Command & Conquer lately (and, really, what are the odds?), you'll welcome this feature.
Ore is no more. There are now only three resources, but they are well-balanced and as easy to manage as in the original. Also, you no longer have to "ping" for oil ù it appears as a dark patch in the water. One improvement I love is that you don't have to muck around with resource management as much as you used to. Once you have three or so peons each harvesting gold and lumber and a couple of oil tankers, you can pretty much build whatever units you want.
Your units are also more intelligent, which should make countless gamers very happy. And although you can select nine of them at once now (up from four), their additional smarts actually makes them harder to control. Units are more assertive about advancing and engaging the enemy. So let's say you have a rank of grunts in front of a rank of Troll axethrowers. Some Elvish archers start shooting the grunts, so they advance to attack the archers. Since the axethrowers don't quite see the archers, and they aren't being attacked directly, they won't take a step forward to shoot the archers back. (You can tell a unit to stand its ground, or patrol between two points, making it easier to get them to do exactly what you want them to). In other words, units function very intelligently by themselves, but they don't coordinate their efforts ù that's your job. It makes this a much better game than the original. Warcraft units didn't have enough smarts; this time, they got it exactly right.
There are a couple of things about Warcraft 2 I didn't like. In Warcraft, the smaller overhead map showed enemy units in red, making them easy to spot. In Warcraft 2, they appear in their clan color. Since opponents change from scenario to scenario, so do the colors of enemy units ù and some enemies may be the same color as previous allies. Certain colors also disappear into the background, making it difficult to spot enemy sneak attacks. If I'm playing on the fastest speed, I'll often lose a sentry before he can yell "We're under attack!" Also, I would like fog of war better if terrain affected line of sight for ground units, but this is pretty nit-picky. The fact is, Warcraft 2 has gone far beyond its predecessor. It looks nicer, and gives you more toys to play with. Best of all, the new features make the game play an order of magnitude better ù and hey, isn't that the point of a sequel, after all?
