Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne (PC) > Reviews > great add-on ever?

Author's product rating:   

Advantages:	great story, level design, tweaks to the game, voice acting, graphics, and value for money
Disadvantages:	takes too long to complete, is very hard

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Probably one of if not the best strategy game ever made released an add-on, yay! If Warcraft 3 wasn’t enough for you, then this amazing add-on prolongs the great story.

Warcraft 3:
For those of you who have never heard of Warcraft 3 or the Warcraft series. Its basically a typical isometric view strategy game with the basic micromanagement for mining gold and chopping wood. Then you use the supplies to train units and build buildings before you go show the opponents’ ass the business end of your shoe. There were four major races in W3 which were:

Humans: who were probably the most annoying to play with because they were led by asshole paladins
Orcs: big green ugly fuckers who are incredibly strong and stupid (see lord of the rings)
Night Elves: blue-skinned, pointy eared, mother nature freaks (tree-hugging hippies if you will)
Undead: by far the most rewarding to play as. Being goods no fun, evil kicks ass.

Anyway, the great thing about the single player campaign is that you play as each one in the story. So you basically get to see the point of view of all the races. It starts of with the Humans just wanting to kick some Orcish ass, then goes on to how……. Actually I don’t want to ruin the story. But trust me the story has so many twists and turns in it. The story is what drove the game for me. As you complete a new bit there’s a cut scene and something happens making you want to start the mission just to see what happens next.

Another thing which separates W3 from a normal strategy game is the fact that you have heroes which gain experience with each kill and gradually get stronger and can do more spells and stuff. There are loads of spells which can be cast, not only by your heroes but also by your wizards, sorceress’s and other magic dudes.

Theres loads more to W3 but I wont go into that otherwise this review would be in the wrong section!

Frozen Throne:
To add to the coolness of the first game this one has loads of stuff. Firstly, obviously, theres a new campaign which takes off where the game stopped. Basically to do with rogue former elf guy who has aligned with a demon to destroy the frozen throne which houses the Lich King. There are also the undead forces who are trying to save the Lich King (Prince Arthas from W3), as well other people like humans and an undead elf hell-bent on revenge sticking their oars in. Like W3 you get to play as each involved race in turn starting with the night elves, then the blood elves, then finally, the undead. You also briefly get to play as the Humans and the Naga (explained later). Again I’ll stress how inventive this aspect is because you get to the point where a race you were controlling before becomes your enemy in later levels and you just get to see the story line from each aspect.

The story line is so rich that it really makes no difference who you are playing as (who’s side of the story you are viewing it from), just that the story line advances with each mission completed. There’s plenty of twists in the story as loads of unexpected stuff happens as well as backstabbing and the like to give a great build up to a dramatic climax. The ending is open so there maybe a Warcraft 4.

The game also includes two new races: as mentioned, the blood elves who are a lot like the humans with a few slightly different units. Also there is the Naga who are an original race as they are sea creatures so can build all their buildings on sea or land as well as being able to travel across both. There are a few new spells and units but I think the main reason for the add-on is for the new campaign (and what a great one it is) and the impressive new tweaks made for single and multiplayer skirmishes to make this game the most tactically advanced strategy game. It allows a lot more complex formations and orders to be given to units to allow you to use the strengths of your army to crush far larger armies with just clever strategy.

The main campaign is also well developed, with most games you get the same old build a base and crush the enemy scenario with maybe some added party based missions where you get the units and go ruin someone’s shit. In this however, although the mentioned do occur there are loads of other types of interesting missions such as controlling two different races at once. There are also really cool original ones like the one where you have to build watch towers along a path way to protect a portal for 30mins while the enemy sends a barrage of troops every so often to destroy that portal. Your success depends on how cleverly you place the towers. There are plenty more RPG-style questions to give you a break from the straight out strategy such as one where you control a hero and have to guide your hero through a dungeon Diablo style (well it is made by Blizzard).

One weird thing is the fact that the Orcs are completely irrelavent to the story which is odd considering the series is based around the Humans Vs Orcs scenario. Although there is a bonus campaign which involves the Orcs although that features you playing as one character and kicking some ass more like an action game which adds to the variety.

Graphics:
The graphics are the same as Warcraft 3 which is excellent. Depending on the capabilities of your graphics card and monitor, you can a get a pretty good resolution. Also the graphics for the spells are really amazing. One really nice touch about this game is the kind-of interactive cut scenes where say for example going to a certain point on the map triggers of a cut scene. Say you went with enemies following you and you were fighting while the cut scene was triggered. If the cut scene is based around that area, you can actually see the fighting in the background which is sooo cool.

Music and Voice acting:
The music is great with a nice metal tune at the end, but the voice acting is out of this world. They definitely got pro’s in to do the voice acting as it is truly amazing. The voice acting for the cut scenes are great but in game they are also excellent. Whenever you click on a character it chooses a response such as “yes?” or “your bidding, master” etc picked out of a random pool of about 5 phrases. Each different type of unit has their own saying. Also a nice extra is if you click on them repeatedly, they will say other stuff which is usually funny such as the Sorceress can say “click me baby one more time (Britney parody)” and the Necromancer “I see undead people (6th sense parody)”. Each different type of unit as about 5 funny phrases.

Difficulty:
There are only two settings for difficulty (normal and hard) and I would say that this is pretty hard. Although the learning curve is not steep, it’s pretty easy to grasp. A lot of the missions require you to be concentrating, as the AI is so good the enemy will not hesitate to screw you in the ass when you let your guard down. This especially so for the base building games as the quicker you attack, the weaker his defences will be (up to a limit though of course). Some missions do even have a time limit although some of them are that you have to survive for a certain amount of time. Also you cant just send in your troops into battle, you really have to use at least basic tactics such as put your archers at the back etc, and this is made easy by you being able to assign groups to shortcuts on your keyboard.

Length:
For an add-on the time it takes to complete this game is insane. Some missions can take hours wheres there are a few that take 10 minutes. There are 28 campaign missions @ say an average of 2 hours per mission, which is 56 hours approx gaming time. I have to admit I used the “warp speed” (units build instantly) and “give extra resources” cheat on the base building missions as I can’t be bothered to spend hours on a mission.

Multiplayer:
Cant be arsed to play it online but apparently, with the new tweaks to combat this add-on provides, its one of the best online strategy games (not to mention the huge cult following).

Requirements:
- Warcraft 3 the original game, this is an add-on only! remember?
- A reasonable PC I have a 1.7 gig CPU, 256 RAM and a GeForce 3 Ti 500 graphics card. It ran fine but the loading time is horrendous for loading a mission so try not to die too much!

Verdict:
This add-on is complete, great story, level design, tweaks to the game, voice acting, graphics, and value for money (it will take you ages to complete unless you cheat like me). Each of those five points is worth a star hence *****!

Thanx for reading!