Warcraft 3- God of all RTS games.

     Today I'll be reviewing the strategy game Warcraft 3, made by Blizzard. Being an RTS, WC3 relies on strategic decisions and micro-management in battle, and it has a heavily contested online playerbase. Whilst not as popular as Starcraft (also made by Blizzard) WC3 is still the best out of the two for me as I find it alot more fun.

     In WC3, the story revolves around 4 races; Humans, Orcs, Night Elves and Undead. In the campaign for each race, you play through a number of scenarios where you battle other races to reach a goal- for example, as the Humans, you must first defeat orcs, then undead, and then find a fabled sword, which leads onto the protagonist becoming the antagonist as the sword corrupts him and starts the undead campaign. The story is excellent, and has many twists and turns, so I wont spoil it for anyone who wants to play it.

Instead, I'll spoil all these famous stories. Sorry.

     Gameplay is like any typical RTS- you build barracks to spawn troops, you build x houses/huts to get x food and so on. Like I said, battles are often won with superior micro management and troop usage rather than sheer numbers. However, what WC3 brought into the RTS genre was "Heroes". Each race has its own set of hero units than lead their army. They level up, which increases all of their stats, and can pick up items from various monsters around each map (which are there just for your hero). No RTS had combined RPG elements like this before, and whilst some people didnt like it, the majority thought it was brilliant (me included).

Typical hero screen, showing items, EXP bar and other stats.

     The real gem in WC3 though is its online mode. You can play ranked or unranked matches of the original WC3 game online for a challenge, or you can head over to the custom games list for a whole lot of fun. There are all kinds of games that modders made using the WC3 engine, from tower defence (which actually originated in WC3) to hero wars and DotA (also originated in WC3). This is what makes the game hugely popular, even now after 7 years, and is what I spent the most time on (next to endless custom matches against bots, which practically made up my childhood.)

 

 Also known as a popular Basshunter song.

     Overall Warcraft 3 is a great game. Along with Half-Life and Runescape (sigh), it definately defined my childhood gaming experience and made me love the RTS genre, which I think is woefully underplayed. You can probably grab Warcraft 3 and its expansions on Amazon now for as little as £5 ($8ish), which is a great price. As always, I hope this review made you consider buying the game and, if you like my stuff, dont forget to leave a comment and follow me to show your support!

Busy day, no review :(

     Sorry for the lack of review today, met up with a bunch of college friends I haven't seen for a while so I didn't have the time to write one up. Never fear, there will be one tomorrow, and I'll get back to all your comments too. For now, here's yet another bad pun:

Geddit? Between the lines? Eh, it's bad.

League of Legends- totally free and totally life consuming.

     Today I'll be reviewing the free online game called League of Legends. LoL is loosely based off of the popular mod for Warcraft 3 named DotA (youtube it), has a huge playerbase across Europe and America, and is also completely free to play.

It's like this, but without the money.

    There are two different game modes; 3v3 (Twisted Treeline) and 5v5 (Summoner's Rift). Each of these modes can be played against people online or against bots at varying levels of difficulty. At the start of every game, you must choose a champion. LoL has a lot of heroes to choose from, although unless you wanna save up Influence Points (which you get after every game and vary in amount, depending on if you win/lose and how many kills you got) or buy Riot Points (nothing is 100% free) you have to make do with the small selection of free to play heroes, which changes every week. After this you can choose summoner spells to help you play. These spells are generally very helpful, like healing spells or teleports, but always have large cooldowns.

Typical champion selection screen.

     The game is kinda like a RPG in the way you have to level your champion to learn skills and abilities which help you kill minions and enemy heroes, which earns you money which you can use to buy beneficial items from the store at your spawn. Gameplay starts off slow but can get very tense and fastpaced in mid to late game. It can also get very heated, with arguments regularly breaking out on the ingame chat (which are incedentally hilarious) and many ragequits if a person isnt doing so well.

Sadly, it happens all the time.

     Overall the game is a hell of a lot of fun, especially if you play with friends, as teamwork is the driving force behind any successful game. I also really like how, in the champion store which I first thought would be a "GIEV US MONY 4 HEROEZ" type of thing, you can use ingame currency to save up and buy new champions without spending a penny of your real money. This is also very rewarding, for if you play well you gain more ingame money and therefore have better heroes.

Not bragging. At all. Nope.

     I hope you enjoyed this review and, as always, if you like my stuff dont forget to follow me and leave a comment to show your support!