War Wind

I like the game but lategame is a huge mess due to design flaws. Comparing to other RTS? Its somewhere between Warcraft 2 and Warcraft 3. The good/neutral: + 4 Races: Quite similar to each other, but each with their own strengths and ambitions + 4 standalone campaigns (they dont follow one story. Instead you can win the war as Race 1, 2 , ...) + Though campaign in later missions, challenging with very different goals in every mission. Specific to the race you play. Very nice and uncommon in the year 1996. There aren't many "kill all missions"! + Heros and Leaders - shows similarity to Warcraft 3. I think Warcraft 3 is inspired by this game. + Game Editor Now the bad things: Think of the late game. You have 50 Warriors. You want all of them to be upgraded, making them far better warriors. First you have to research upgrades and spells. Done by units. Not that bad but unusual. - Upgrading, learning new spells is done unit by unit. Has to be done in buildings which have only place for 3 units. Thats a lot of clumsy micromanagment: 5 upgrades each unit x 50 units. 250 upgrades unit by unit. 10 of these units have spells, so 10 x 5 spells. 50 upgrades unit by unit. - The battle with these 50 units may only take 2 minutes while researching and fiddling around with all the upgrades takes much longer. - Movement: there is no autoattack while moving and your units - in idle/wait mode - ignore enemies that pass them. only auto attack is the counter when they get attacked. Skirmish: most maps are human vs human optimized. A lot of maps are very special, which is nice in first place but do you have any friends who would play this game nowadays? Does the multiplayer even work now? I don't know.

I literally just googled this game to see if it was around online anywhere, and found it was on GoG and it's free to boot! This was given to me by my uncle when I was 9 or 10(a few years after it came out), I played many many hours of this playing against AI and creating my own very one-sided maps <_< I had lots of enjoyment with this one, and I'm definitely going to appreciate the nostalgia trip... I still have some of the voice lines stuck in my head. It was certainly not the best RTS at the time, I also played the Warcraft games and Command & Conquer, but War Wind was plenty of fun.

Although with some minor defect, Warwind is an RTS with features that truly were ahead of its time. Although the campaigns for each race tend to look similar after a while, the four campaigns feature a good variety of missions and the presence of hero units were a feature unseen when it came out. Furthermore, the lore of the game is interesting and captivating, with extremely different motivations and philosophy for each race, while the narration provides further sense of alienation and mysteriousness. Graphics and design are pretty cool and in theme too. However, as said earlier, it does have some issues with unit balance and an inconsistent AI in free play. Still, it's a must-buy for any RTS fan, just to play one single campaign and immerse oneself in the world of Warwind.

One of the first RTS I've ever played and the art style and creativity involved is still top notch today. Unfortunately, if you look past the Nostalgia this game is not without issues. Netcode, AI, pathfinding and optimization are as bad as they can be. There are a lot of "hidden" mechanics that require intensive research (at least material is provided in the in game help) to even discover which makes it hard for new players to get into this title without a guide. There are also 3 major grievances I have with this game: 1) In the "newest" version (the one you'll download) they removed spell casting from the list of group commands which is a real pain in the ass - even if I can understand why it might be necessary balance wise. This means, if you want to cast spells you will need to select individual mages and then manually shuffle through them. 2) This game has control group key bindings but unlike modern RTS where there is one group selection hotkey for "just select the group" and "select the group and center camera on it" WW only has the latter which is super annoying. 3) The GOG version is not entirely DRM free: https://www.gog.com/forum/war_wind_series/single_player_scenario_problem_terminal_error/post19 Still, the campaign is great and this is anything but your typical RTS. Wish the genre had brought up more games like War Wind in the past.

The story and character designs are fascinating, but this is a VERY classic RTS game which requires memorizing a manual to fully understand. No tutorial level I could find and it drops you in the middle of a world you can't easily understand with a ton of units with weird names you can't easily tell their function. I was hoping for an alien version of Warcraft but at least there I could tell workers from soldiers. I can't tell which aliens I own are soldiers, which are workers, what I'm supposed to be doing! I love the music and the atmosphere anyway, and the graphics are colorful and unique, but the animation is limited so it feels like you're moving at a jerky FPS. Between the inability to tell what my units were doing very easily, the ability to tell what my units could do, and after reading tons of hints my inability to even tell what the first mission's end goal was I was defeated. I didn't have much luck with the sequel either.