Here come the giants!

Each race gains a new hero unit with his/her own set of four new spells.  The orcs gain a shadow hunter with voodoo powers.  He can send a healing wave of energy that bounces between friendly units, turn enemies into animals, call forth a spiritual serpent to strike at enemies, and make surrounding units invulnerable for a short time.  The humans now have an elven blood mage with fire powers including a flame pillar strike and the ability to summon a phoenix, a flying unit that burns all around it including itself.  When the phoenix dies it leaves behind an egg that will hatch into a new phoenix.  The undead have the crypt lord, a huge beetle that can cast an impaling spell and defend itself with a spike carapace.  It can also summon locusts that heal the crypt lord as they damage enemy units, and carrion beetles from corpses that remain in play until slain.  The new night elf hero is the warden.  The warden's low level spells are not very powerful - a fan of knives that strikes all nearby enemies and the ability to teleport - but her vengeance spell summons a spellcasting avatar that can raise invulnerable spirits from the corpses of slain allies.

In addition to the new heroes, each race gains a new ground-based and a new flying unit, and a new structure that allows you to build a shop in your base.  Each race also gets three new upgrades; the undead are now able to burrow crypt fiends, humans can add an anti-air rocket attack to siege engines, and orcs can add burning oil to demolisher attacks, to name a few.  Those of you who missed the naval units from Warcraft II will be happy to see the addition of a new shop, the goblin shipyard.  While it doesn't provide unique naval units to each race, it will allow you to purchase transports and attack ships.  Another new neutral building is the tavern, which allows you to hire a neutral hero to fight for your side.

The Frozen Throne adds an entire new game's worth of gameplay to Warcraft III, so if you enjoyed Warcraft III then you should not hesitate to pick up The Frozen Throne.  If you're purely an online gamer not interested in the campaigns, then you may want to wait until the price drops on the expansion.  You'll get new Battle.net features that include automated tournaments and clan support, but whether or not these features and the addition of the new units justify the purchase price is something you'll need to decide for yourself.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 92%.  Another great effort from Blizzard.  You'll enjoy The Frozen Throne as much as you did Warcraft III.

System Requirements:  Warcraft III; Pentium II 400; 128 MB RAM;  8 MB Video RAM; 4x CD-ROM;  550 MB Hard Drive Space;  Mouse.

« Page 1 of 2