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Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness / Beyond the Dark Portal -pc-

Review by Pete

Warcraft 2 is a real time strategy game released in late 1995 on the PC. It was a game that took the RTS genre leaps and bounds forward in terms of innovation, practicality, accessibility, and graphically. I went through and beat Warcraft 2 recently to see if the game was able to stand the test of time, and it most certainly does.

I was 14 years old in 1995 when Warcraft 2 was released. Having played its predecessor Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, I was excited about the sequel. My buddies Paul and Joey had bought it first because they has a CD-ROMs with their computers, and I spent many days and nights at their houses making my way through the campaigns. Then in May of 1996 on my 15th birthday I used my birthday money and some of my own to purchase a CD-ROM for my parents 386 computer. CD-ROM were still pretty new and the thing cost me like $150. I bought the thing so I could finally play Warcraft 2 at my house.

I brought the thing home and installed the hardware, then I installed the game. I was pretty much going bananas with excitement. I’m such a nerd. I get the game going and I start the first mission of the human campaign, but the game didn’t run at 100% speed, it was like 60-70% speed, my computer couldn’t handle the game fully. But you know what, I didn’t even care. I knew it was only running at 70%, but I had Warcraft 2 in my house after like $200 spent. And 200 bones was like 6 months of saving up lawn mowing money.

I’ve always loved video games, all kinds of video games! We had a Nintendo and Super Nintendo in our house growing up. I had played all genre of games, but the RTS genre was something altogether new to me. Perhaps that is why I was so intrigued by it. I had complete control of all of the characters on the screen. I can tel  my little guys to go wherever I want, and I immediately feel in love with it. As I played more and more, I was determined to discover the optimal build and attack strategies in order to succeed.

The objective of Warcraft 2 is almost always to destroy the enemy base. At your disposal, you’ll have the collective will of either the orc or the human factions. You’ll begin each level with a handful of workers and a main structure. You’ll need to collect gold from a nearby gold mine, and eventually lumber from trees. You’ll need to build structures with your workers to have your force grow. These new structures will produce various types of soldier units to attack the enemy base. That basically how it works.

In Warcraft 1, both the orcs and humans produced units with very similar attributes and abilities. The human footmen and orc grunt were basically the same unit but with different skin. Same with the axe thrower and archer, the catapult and the ballista. But in Warcraft 2 we began to see more differences in the two races. Orcs and footmen still had the same stats, but now we had human Paladins and orc Ogre Mages. Paladins could heal friendly units and cast damaging spells on the undead, while Ogre Mages could use spells like bloodlust to double attack damage. There were human Mages and orc Death Knights. There were still similar spells between the two with both haing an area of effect damage spell in Blizzard and Death and Decay, but there were some differences with Mages having polymorph and Death Knights havining Death Coil.

You could get a real sense of the culture of each faction by what spells they produced. The orcs were bloodthirsty feral tribes with desires of conquest in war, while the humans were a noble people with spells to aid each other. Warcraft 2 also had full voice support. There were cut scenes between each mission where a voice would describe the situation of the war, and update you on your objectives. Then when in game, when you selected a unit, they would respond with “Your command master” and “Ready to work”. Quotes can be found here. There was also the fun addition when you could excessively click on a unit, it would act annoyed and begin to respond with humorous things to say.

Warcraft 2 featured 2 full campaigns as both the humans and the orcs. Each campaign is composed of like 12 missions. Then in 1996 an expansion was released entitled Warcraft 2: Beyond the dark portal. This expansion gave you 12 more missions for each faction and continued with the sotryline. Plus it was a ton harder than the original.

Like all Blizzard games, Warcraft 2 had a long staying power. One of the big factors was because of the multiplayer. You could either have two computer play against 2 people, or go 1 on 1. The problem was back in the day we were all on dial up modems that went through the phone line. Whenever we played with each other (from different houses) our families couldn’t use the phone. This caused some serious anger from my friends parents. My parents would have gotten furious, but we didn’t even have a modem. It was only years later that we bought a new computer with a dial up modem, but by that time we were prepared and purchased a second phone line. The most fun I had with Warcraft 2 multiplayer was while I was in high school. Some dude at Provo High School had rigged up the computers in the computer lab to play Warcraft 2 together. Oh boy did we spend some time after school playing us some serious Warcraft 2. It was only when Warcraft 2 was surpassed when Blizzard released Starcraft in late 1998 when we  stopped playing Warcraft 2.

Warcraft 2 is a great looking game. I was entranced by the graphics at the time, and when going back and playing it through again now, it still looks pretty good. Each unit has its own personality, and it shows with their appearance. Whenever you kill a unit, its body will lie there for a couple of minutes while it slowly deteriorated. Orc Death Knights even had a spell that could raise skeletons to fight for them if the corpses were still there. When buildings took damage they would start on fire. The more damage they took, the more fire. Then when a building was destroyed a hole in the ground remained for a short time. There were just so many satisfying things like these that would happen that made you want to play more.

Warcraft 2 also featured aquatic battles. These battles were removed for Warcraft 3 and were not featured in Starcraft. Aquatic battles weren’t as good as the land ones. There were 3 types of water battle ships and one oil collector. Battle ships included one weak and fast, the other slow and strong, and one stealth. In order to see the stealth unit, you needed an air unit. I used these battleships to supplement my regular ground units if there was a battle that would take place close to a shoreline. They can be pretty mean when used correctly.

Warcraft 2 was also ported to the Playstation 2 and Sega Satrun, but those versions of the game were garbagetown and totally unplayable. Much like Starcraft 64.

An innovation brought forth in Warcraft 2 for real time strategy games was the control group macro. Keeping track of your units can be pretty tough when you got like 50 guys running around. A control group is when I save a group of units to be called upon when I press a specific button. Like say I have 9 grunts and 9 axe throwers and I want to keep them separate. I can save the 9 grunts by pressing Ctrl + 1, so now when I press 1 it will pull up those 9 grunts. also, I could select all the units of a certain type by pressing Ctrl + left click. There are a ton of things that came forth in Warcraft 2 that are the standard of RTS games. Warcraft 2 also comes with a sweet level editor. You can make your own levels! revolutionary at the time.

The only complaint I have is I wish that Paladins couldn’t 1 shot my Death Knights with Exorcism. Its funny how the computer in certain campaign missions will just “sense” that one of my Death Knights is remotely near and snipe off my death Knights from max range. Also the orc mission on Beyond the Dark portal is nigh impossible. It was the only level I couldn’t beat when I was young. Now, as a grown man, I am proud to say that I defeated the final mission on the Beyond the Dark Portal expansion. It took me like 5 hours though.

Warcraft 2 is one of the best games I ever played and its still fun to play now. Warcraft lore is deep and entertaining. The story continues on with Warcraft 3, then with wildly popular Warcraft Worlds that Ill be reviewing in a weeks time. Go pick up the Warcraft 2 battle.net battle chest edition at the Blizzard store if you’re at all interested. I can guarantee You a good time. Someday when I have a child, I’ll put him through some crazy RTS bootcamp and this is the first game I’ll have lined up for him. I award you a lengendary 5/5.

-Review by Pete July 15, 2010