GameSpot Honours Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness as another Greatest Game of All Time!

GameSpot has added another title to its Greatest Games of All Time fame, and this time it's Blizzard Entertainment's classic genre defining RTS, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness.

GameSpot focuses mainly on the Multiplayer portion of the game and the classic Kali days of yester-year.

While in my opinion not as defining or revolutionary as Doom was to gaming, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness is one of my favourite classic RTSes of all time, and I agree that it was the title that modernized the genre and laid the ground work for every other RTS to come.

The Single Player Campaign was great mission-based fun with an excellent selection of units, combat, and humour. You generally started with a few workers and combat units, built up your town and secured resources and then proceeded to crush your opponent on the map. The game's story followed the second Great War between the Human Alliance and the Orc Horde, as the Orcs, after a brief respite from their destruction of the kingdom of Azeroth in Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, sailed north to pursue the human refugees and wage war against the newly formed Human Alliance. The sequel saw High Elves and Dwarves join forces with the Humans and Trolls, Ogres, Goblins, and some Undead pledge their allegence to the Orcs.

Multiplayer was also great fun, where you and a friend could easily connect via modem (I played it on a 14.4!) and battle with one another over a great selection of maps. There were so many strategies that you could employ, from tower walls, to grunt rushing, to fast expanding, etc. The newly added water based combat also added a great new dimension to the game, as it required greater strategy to push through a navel blockade and land your transports full of ground troops to assault an enemy town. There was also limited air combat with Gryphon Riders for the Humans and Dragons for the Orcs, as well as a flying scout unit for each faction. The amount of build orders and possible battles that could occur were great indeed, and I spent many an hour crushing some good friends under my iron foot.

The game also featured a great, simple-to-use map editor. While you couldn't create Single Player Campaigns that would link together, the map was always limited to a basic "Destroy All Enemies" scenerio, you could quickly create excellent Multiplayer maps that for you and friends to play on, both balanced or with unique themes like capture the fort. I was never much of a map maker, even in my PC gaming prime, however Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness allowed me to easily create a great deal of fun maps to play on without racking my brain or spending a lot of time.

You can read GameSpot's full article here.