Warcraft 2: The Tides of Darkness was the much awaited sequel to the ever popular Warcraft: Orcs and humans. After watching the opening cinematic, the time is set 6 years after the first game, in which it is revealed that the orcs emerged as being victorious in Azeroth, and the surviving flee north to Lordaeron, allying with elves and dwarves. The orcs decide they want to invade the northern lands as well, and the cinematic features the orcish fleet arriving at Lordaeron, with the allies preparing for the pending war.
Warcraft 2: The Tides of Darkness was the much awaited sequel to the ever popular Warcraft: Orcs and humans. After watching the opening cinematic, the time is set 6 years after the first game, in which it is revealed that the orcs emerged as being victorious in Azeroth, and the surviving flee north to Lordaeron, allying with elves and dwarves. The orcs decide they want to invade the northern lands as well, and the cinematic features the orcish fleet arriving at Lordaeron, with the allies preparing for the pending war.
As with the predecessor, you get the option of playing as either Orcs or Humans, however the variety of units has been far enhanced, such the possibility of training sea faring units such as battleships
and submarines, as well as aerial units featuring dragons and gryphon riders. As well as new units, some of the older units have met a demise in the sequel, notably units such as clerics and necrolytes have now been disbandoned in the sequel, now blended with existing melee units in the form of an upgrade allowing spells to be cast; for the humans the knights can be upgraded to Paladins with the heal and divination abilities, and for the orcs the Ogres can become Ogre-Magi, accompanied a change in the portrait and a different voice compared to before. Rather than just gold and lumber being the only resources, oil is now available, which is needed predominately for the naval units and can only be collected from oil patches from the sea.
After playing as both Humans and Orcs for a little while, I noticed that the 2 sides seemed a lot more evenly balanced than they did in the predecessor – In the first installment, it was considerably easier to win the game playing as the human side in both the single player campaign as well as over the network, due mostly to the ability of the human soldiers to heal via clerics, and also the extended range that was provided by the human archers over the orcish spearmen, in which a common tactic was to train about 15 to 20 archers and make 2 files as a defense to your base, in which absolutely every enemy unit was killed in a matter of seconds, even the orcish daemon, which was the most powerful unit in the game.
The graphics are also different to the original, most notably the size of the units being so much bigger than in the first game, and also the amount of detail that is featured on each unit in comparison to Warcraft. The movies that are featured were extraordinary for the time, in fact some still are.
Overall, the sequel promised more than the predecessor, and did deliver. It’s a pretty easy game to pick up, even if you haven’t played the original, with a very simple interface that makes it easy to interact with characters and building structures, which will guarantee a good lot of your time spent indoors from the first moment you play this game. It’s a classic! You’d be missing out if you didn’t download it.
