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| Bottom Line: It's a marriage from heaven: Something old, something new, something borrowed, and something...um...green. |
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Graphics & Sound
You can't just take an RTS, churn it through Direct3D, and have a winner on your hands. It has to look good, right?
I've got to say it right now. I haven't played any other game that looks this good in 800x600. Blizzard spared no effort with the color pallete. This is a game that you'll want to play in 800x600 with all the options turned on before you play it in 1600x1200 with only half the options on. And if you play it in 32-bit color, you won't want to switch back to 16-bit color ever.
There are a lot of very nice lighting effects employed throughout the game, both for spells and for map objects, like barriers and fountains/shrines. Some very nice graphic effects are also used for area-effect targets and unit auras. The only bad point I can really give to the graphics is the limited amount of unit animations. In several circumstances, units were used to portray specific actions in cutscenes, but the limited animations of the character models made it difficult to suspend disbelief. This becomes mostly visible during the ending sequences, as the developers got goofy with the ending sequence and showed various units doing rather odd things. Arthas, for instance, pretends to be playing a guitar, while still holding his warhammer, of course.
The script is very well done. The character lines are very engaging and move the story along well. The character portraits don't always mesh together with the lines, unfortunately, but it doesn't mar the experience much. As I mentioned before, it would be nice if some of the battle clashing lines would have been accurately presented, though. For instance, there are several conversations between Tyrande and Furion during the Night Elves campaign which frequently occur in the middle of a battle. Yet they speak calmly and plainly, which certainly wouldn't be the case if you were busy fighting for your life.
The musical score is top-notch Blizzard excellence as well. I particularly enjoyed the Orcish and Night Elves themes, as they had the same mysterious drama to them that the Protoss music held. However, seasoned veterans can eventually get tired of even the really good music (especially if they stick to one race), so I'd like to point out in this review, as I have in several before, that the time for widespread use of dynamically-generated soundtracks is highly appropriate.
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