WarCraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal (Expansion Set)
by Blizzard Entertainment
Our Price: $29.98
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Category: Video Games
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Product Summary
Format: CD-ROMPublisher: Blizzard Entertainment
Product features:
- Requires full version of WarCraft II to play
- Dominate or die in 24 all new scenarios set within 2 new story lines
- Discover new lands in over 50 custom maps created exclusively for bigger, bolder and bloodier battles
- Step through the dak portal and venture into the ORC homelands for the first time
- New legendary heroes aid in your quest as the battle between man and orc continues. Stunning new 3D cinematic sequences bring the world of warcraft to life
Video Game Reviews of WarCraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal (Expansion Set)
Customer Review: A fun expansion pack for an RTS classic, but could use more extras
Summary: 4 Stars
Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness is a great RTS game. It has a well-thought out storyline, cool units, good gameplay balance, and fun multiplayer and single player maps. Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal is a fairly standard expansion for it, adding new single player scenarios and a new map tileset for the Orc homeworld, Draenor.
The expansion continues from where the human ending of Tides of Darkness, which Blizzard arbitrarily decided would be the canonical ending of Warcraft II, left off. The Orcs have been driven out of Azeroth, their leaders dead, their forces scattered, the dragon queen they captured freed, and their portal destroyed. The land of Azeroth has been returned to its people, and they have rebuilt the capital city, calling it New Stormwind.
However, all is not well in the world of warcraft (which oddly enough became the title of an MMORPG sequel to this game). Ner'Zhul, the evil orc shaman, has reunited the infighting orc clans to create a new Horde and plans to open new portals to conquer other worlds. With the dragon deathwing supporting him and magical items in hand, he poses the greatest threat to Azeroth yet. In order to stop him, a group of Alliance forces led by the Elf Ranger General Alleria Windrunner (sister of Sylvanas from Warcraft 3) head into the rift joining Azeroth and Draenor to seal it from the orc homeworld.
Gameplay is centered around gathering resources and using them to train soldiers and construct buildings and war machines. Peasants and peons gather gold and lumber while oil tankers collect oil. Peasants also construct all buildings except oil platforms, which are built by oil tankers. Out of buildings new units are built and upgrades researched. Usually the player with the most resources spent wins. However, that is not always the case. Clever unit management, like using a flying machine to spot a death knight for a paladin so that the paladin will be able to use exorcism on the DK just as quickly as it uses death coil on him, and willl be able to prevail because of greater spell strength, and getting the right units for the job, like submarines to stealthily attack enemy fleets and catapults to lay siege to buildings, matters too.
There aren't very many units but they're all quite different from eachother. There are virtually no similarities between a knight and a destroyer or an ogre mage and an archer. Both the humans and orcs combat units are basically identical, but their spells are completely different. For example, orcs tend to rely on one called bloodlust to boost their attack power and runes to blow up incoming enemies, while humans use healing to keep their units alive and polymorph to turn powerful enemies into harmless pigs. It certainly makes the battle interesting, which can occur on land, sea, and air.
Also, if you're up against a good opponent, just rushing with a bunch of units won't work. By the time you arrive they'll have guard towers up and units patrolling their base's perimeter. You have to be skillful and manage your forces carefully to win.
The controls of the game work pretty well. Control groups on the 0-9 keys can be set to select groups of units and there are hot keys for just about anything. There are some notable issues, like only being able to select a certain number of units at a time and not being able to set rally points, but the first encourages grouping your units logically and discourages rushing so it's not all bad.
The graphics, while old, are still nice and charming. The unit proportions could use some work (I don't think knights were as big as farms), but the colors, textures, and outlines are nice, as well as the little portraits. The sound is amazing, with tons of great songs and units saying colorful and often humorous things when you click on them multiple times ("Are you still touching me?" "I like blowing things up!"). The only real problem here is that most of the naval units say exactly the same thing, but that's more like a not fully played up advantage as opposed to a real disadvantage, and the sound effects are nice. Overall the audio is great.
One issue with the game is that unlike more modern expansion packs, it doesn't add more units, which is unfortunate, since I've always fallen in love with new editions in later titles (like the medic in SC and the spellbreaker in WC3), however, the original units are all here, plus there are new heroes in campaign mode with cool abilities and new quotes to keep things fresh. Plus, thankfully those tutorial type levels are gone and various unit types become available much earlier in the game before, making battles much more interesting. The combat is fast and furious over both land and sea. On some battles I've inflicted 500 casualties or more on the enemy! And you can make it as fast or slow as you want with the many speed settings.
So, while not a big leap up from the original, this is still a solid expansion pack that adds to the fun of the first game. And at $6.00, you can't beat the price, so pick it up and beat some orcs (or humans, depending on your personal preferences)!
Description of WarCraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal (Expansion Set)
system requirements: MS-DOS, Windows 95/3.1. SVGA graphics, DOS 5.0 or higher, 33 Mhz 486 or faster, 8MB RAM, hard drive, CD-ROM drive, supports Redbook audio, general MIDI, sound blaster, adlib, Pro audio spectrum, gravis and compatibles.All games
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