A half-baked expansion. (Warcraft II - Beyond the Dark Portal (PS))

Member Name: Mutalisk

Product:	Warcraft II - Beyond the Dark Portal (PS)
Date:	13/09/09 (48 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: new campaigns, well designed levels, new hero units, good cinematics, adds to plot. Orc homeland.

Disadvantages: causes plot confusion, heroes arent that good, no new units, spells, in game graphics or speech

Beyond the Dark Portal is a 1996 expansion pack to hugely popular, critically acclaimed, classic real time strategy game, Warcraft II (1996). The Warcraft series is set in a medieval fantasy Universe with magic and swords and the like, and the player must create a base, or a number of bases to train such units as footmen, mages, catapults, axethrowers, ballistas, warlocks and archers in order to ultimately destroy the enemy bases. It was originally released for MS-DOS but in short, owing to its popularity, it has been ported onto the Playstation, Sega Saturn, Linux, MAC OS and Windows.

Warcraft II gave the player the option to play a campaign as either the orc or humans. This expansion pack offers a new linear campaign for each race, featuring a total of 24 single-player levels, (the length of the original single-player campaigns) complete with well-rendered 3D cinematic sequences to break them up. The new levels are very well designed and flow very well. Also they complement the direct plot continuation superbly, especially with the new hero units which, despite being only slightly stronger than their original unit counterpart, having no new speech of their own and no new graphics, are still a nice touch. Sadly, these hero units can also not be used in the Warcraft Map Editor without quite a bit of awkward tweaking.

The game fails to include any new trainable units, buildings, upgrades or
spells. This helps the game to maintain its delicate balance, but still makes the expansion pack feel a little half-baked.
There are over 50 new well-designed multiplayer maps, and the campaigns include an excursion to the Orc Homeland, which is a very refreshing idea and handled quite well, although there have been no upgrades to the games graphics, which were dated even at the time of the expansion pack's release.

Its a very playable expansion pack overall that retains the feel of the original game. Unfortunately though, it doesn't really add anything, and it often doesn't really feel like you are playing an expansion, due to the fact that the game was about tricky micromanagement, defense, construction and attack. The gameplay mechanics are exactly the same in Beyond The Dark Portal, and it seems the primary element of expansion is the storyline which, very few avid players of Warcraft II were in the least bit invested in. These new plotlines also cause the canon to become convoluted when the sequel, Warcraft III was released, which is much more story oriented.

This game is only worth playing if you are an avid Warcraft II fan, and are very interested in the story and heroes. Whilst the new multiplayer maps are very good, there are plenty of much better ones available for legal download the internet wide. Avoid.

Summary: Overall its just not worth buying.