What is Warcraft III - Reign of Chaos?

Warcraft III is one of the most popular realtime strategy game ever created. The game has a sophisticated storyline and distinctive graphics, as well as soundtrack. Awesome for playing in groups :)

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The wait is over for WarCraft and StarCraft fans. The epic battle between Humans and Ores is reborn in WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos. The world of WarCraft has a new threat, as a mysterious prophet warns of the advancing demonic Burning Legion. The story unfolds with four points of view that you can play: the Humans, attempting to save their kingdom; the Undead, in league with the conquering demons; the Ores, searching for a new home; and the Night Elves, defending their homeland against the invading races and demons.

The thrill of gathering resources, assembling forces, building structures, and researching technology for smashing your opponents remains in this version, and intermittent rescue and survival missions expand upon the story line. Along with the real-time strategy elements, you'll also encounter role-playing elements reminiscent of Blizzard's Diablo series. A hero can gain experience, advance levels, use items, and develop skills and spells. Under the new Upkeep rule, high volumes of personnel require high upkeep — meaning a big leech on your gold reserves. While a bit of a downer at first, this new system prevents massive hordes from devastating the landscape, making you use your forces and heroes more effectively, especially for online play. Features such as an Idle Worker button. Auto Cast settings for spells, and Auto Repair for workers near a damaged building provide much better ways to control your minions than WarCraft II and StarCraft offered. You can even save a replay of your gam es and either examine where you need to Improve or just gloat over your victory.

We commend Blizzard's efforts in updating a great 2D strategy game while retaining the original's feel and playability, but the results are mixed. The game is astounding in three dimensions, but units can be difficult to see, even with the tiltable viewpoint. And even on a reasonably powerful eMac (a 700MHz G4), the game’s movement and animation get a little choppy when you have many armies onscreen at once. This can be frustrating attimes when you need every split second to attack your opponent effectively while keeping control of your troops — especially online, where chaos in the ranks means defeat.

The cinema cut scenes are marvelous and worthy of a big-budget film, engrossing you in the WarCraft world. The superb sound immerses you even more deeply with a wonderful soundtrack, good voice acting, ambient sounds (wind, birds, and so forth), and great sound effects. Also, the character designs look great and are both imaginative and functional. WarCraft III possesses a level of personality and quality that raises the bar for real-time strategy games.

When you finish the single-player missions, you can set up a single or team match between you and the computer, or go online and fight for fun and glory. Feel creative? Make custom maps and missions to modify your gameplay, then try them out on Battle.net (WarCraft's free online gaming service) and test your fellow players' mettle. LAN play is also supported.

WarCraft doesn't take itself too seriously, which is a refreshing change — and a lot of fun — in this conquer-the-world genre. It might not be the breakthrough video-game experience everyone was hoping for, but WarCraft III is a rewarding and addictive challenge.

Osborn, Matt. (December 2002). WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos. MacAddict. (pg. 48).

Download Warcraft III - Reign of Chaos for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 9.2

Compatibility notes

Architecture: PPC (G3 400 MHz or faster)

At least 128 MB of RAM

Mac OS 9.x - Mac OS X 10.1 - 10.4

A graphics card with at least 16 MB of VRAM (32 MB recommended)

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CD key required. You can also use a PC version CD key, or find yourself one on the internet.

Recommended configuration:
PPC G4/G5 (600MHz)
256MB of RAM
32MB 3D ATi/nVidia graphics card
700MB of harddrive space

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Works on Mac OS 9.2.2 on an iMac G4 (512MB RAM / 700MHz G4

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Tested on:
PowerMac G4
Mac OS X 10.3
PowerPC G4 processor at 400Mhz
768MB of RAM
ATi Rage 128 Pro

– result: Laggy, but playable.. Even on the lowest settings. Perhaps a better graphics card would do the job.

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@Taranabas

Tested on:
Powermac G4 450 on 9.2.2 and 10.2
768MB Ram
ATI Rage 128 Pro
-Very laggy, bad graphics, wouldn't consider this playable at lowest settings.