Warcraft 3: Frozen Throne

You know the scenario – you’ve invested in the newest super-über-cool game, and run through the game in record time. Following that you play through the game a couple of times more, but eventually it becomes too much of the same, and now even this super-über-cool game becomes tedious and boring. You long for new things – possibly in the form of a game expansion.

Time goes by and the big day arrives – the expansion that will make your, by now tedious and boring game, into a super-über-cool game yet again. Unfortunately it doesn’t always work that way. All too often you find nothing really new in the expansion, no innovation – instead you just get the same old girl in a new dress. But you’re already tired of her. So you end up feeling screwed, after spending your hard earned money on that piece of crap.

Luckily, the above scenario rarely is the case with neither the games, nor the expansions from Blizzard. Whether Warcraft 3: Frozen Throne is the exception or not, you can find out by reading on.

Illidian is back, and he brought friends

Icy Peak

The game starts out with a real Blizzard style, impressive movie sequence, in which Illidian (our exiled Night Elf Demon Hunter, known from Warcraft 3) awakens the Naga from their pseudo slumber in the sea – making them return to the surface and assist Illidian in his mission.

The Naga is a NPC race of fishlike humanoids with snakelike tails – a physically robust race, not to be taken lightly. The Naga can move over both land and water without problems, and some of them also have the ability to hide under water.

Frozen Throne Does Have New Stuff

Let’s start by concluding that there are no revolutionary new graphics – but that is not to be expected either, since this is only an expansion. This does, however, not mean that there’s nothing new in FT overall – on the contrary.

Frozen Throne contains a good deal of new things. You get four new campaigns, four new race specific heroes, two new units per race, new land tiles, five new neutral heroes (as an example you can get the Pandaren Brewmaster by completing a bonus mission).

But lots of other not so good expansions have new maps and new units – so what makes FT different from many expansions is a combination of things. I can tell you this: it’s not the humongous Penguin King you may run across, though I did find it funny. In the new campaigns you don’t just play the usual races, as you did in the Warcraft 3 original. Though you do get to play with those races, you also get the pleasure of controlling other NPC races, such as the aforementioned Naga who, together with Illidian, play a central role in the plot of Frozen Throne.

The missions throughout the game make good use of both the races and their heroes. One mission is your typical build-up-a-base-and-destroy-the-enemy-base, while in another mission all you have available is your hero and perhaps a few units. Also the new heroes are also a welcomed addition to the game. In particular the new Undead hero, the Crypt Lord, which gives the Undead a much needed tough guy (Yes, I’m an undead kind of guy). The new heroes also add to the tactical aspect of the game.

Some of the new neutral heroes also make for a comic relief, as for example the Pandaren Brewmaster, a giant panda, or the Shadow Hunter and his Rastafarian speech.

RPG Campaign

An interesting feature in FT is the Bonus Campaign, which both makes up for the lack of Orc participation in the three main campaigns, and also adds another perspective to Warcraft 3. The bonus campaign is a RPG style campaign, in which you start out with the NPC hero, Beastmaster, half orc and half ogre.

I didn’t find this last part particularly entertaining, although it was a change of pace from the normal Warcraft 3. I prefer Warcraft 3 as the RTS game, not RPG, although there will always be a RPG element in Warcraft 3.

The Multi Player Experience

WC3 Frozen throne Multiplayer

One thing you fear when a lot of new things are added, is unbalancing the game, making one race too powerful. But by my, albeit short, experience with Frozen Throne in multiplayer, it doesn’t seem to be the case.

The developers of Frozen Throne wanted to add to the tactical aspects of the game, by adding new units, new heroes, and upgrade they have. However, I won’t go into detail on the new units and upgrades, as there are far to many to cover for this review without boring 95% of the readers.

Was Worth the Wait - Is Worth the Cost

The Frozen Throne

The missions in FT have a good variaty of objectives and ways to achieve the objectives. And they are well connected throughout the campaigns with the normal sequences you see between each mission, as you saw it in Warcraft 3 too.

Graphically the game is the same as the original. The background music and sounds in FT are good too. This is based on the fact that I did not turn off the background music, as I do in so many other games, simply because it fell into the background and instead added to the mood of the game. The sound, in particular the voices and comments of your units, are as usual also well done. Nothing much to add there, as nothing has really changed from the original Warcraft 3.

I never really had any problems with Frozen Throne, except for not being able to see the human Knight units, but that was fixed by a quick reinstall – so the game seemed fairly bug free - but I guess, by now, most people expect nothing less when buying a Blizzard game.

Warcraft 3: Frozen Throne is an expansion that more than lives up to my expectations, as well as lives up to the known Blizzard standard – it was well worth the wait and it is well worth the cost. The game gets an overall rating of 9, simply because I find the gameplay much more important than the graphics and sounds.