Warcraft: Orcs & Humans - Reception

Reception

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans became by far the company's greatest success to that date, and for the first time made the company's finances secure. In November 1995 Entertainment Weekly reported that the game ranked 19th of the top 20 CDs across all categories.

Although reviews did not appear until months later, MobyGames's collection of reviews shows scores from 92% to 75%, except that MobyGames estimated a score of 40% for a Swedish review. In Dragon Paul Murphy described the game as "great fun – absorbing and colorful," and Scott Love praised its solid strategy, simple interface and fantasy theme. Warcraft: Orcs & Humans won PC Gamer’s Editors' Choice Award, Computer Life’s Critics' Pick and the Innovations Award at the Consumer Electronics Show, Winter 1995. It was a finalist for Computer Gaming World’s Premier award, PC Gamer’s Strategy Game of the Year and the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences's Best Strategy award.

The early stage of a game can be slow, as the player must produce a few basic buildings and peasants in order to gather resources, and then start building combat units. Meanwhile the AI does not have to spend as much effort on gathering resources and often starts with more buildings, which forces the player to spend more of each contest on the defensive.

While the basic units of the two sides were identical, the more advanced forces favored the Orcs, especially the Daemon, summoned by the Orc Warlock.

The user interface had an unsophisticated appearance, but worked in most respects. However the selecting of no more than four units at a time was restrictive. Gamers found the play hard work, as often two or three of the gamer's units would attack without orders, while the rest still did nothing, and buildings could also lie idle without orders. There was no queuing of construction or research.

Some reviewers thought the game's AI was unintelligent and predictable, and one wished for a facility to set the difficulty level. Others found the AI's raids were well managed, and usually found the weaknesses in the gamer's position. One reviewer found pathfinding adequate, while others found it very poor, and one considered this as typical of RTS games.

On both the DOS and Macintosh versions, the game ran very slowly during large battles.

The good stereo sound helped gamers to locate events that occurred outside the current viewport. Some reviewers like units' speech effects, especially in response to repeated clicks, while others found this monotonous. Game Revolution’s review of the Mac version complained that Warcraft: Orcs & Humans’s graphics, which were ported from the DOS version's VGA, did not exploit the Macintosh's superior resolution. However, Game Revolution and Mac Gamer agreed that visual shortcomings did not reduce Mac gamers' enjoyment of the engrossing gameplay. Both also complained that the Macintosh was released about a year later than the DOS version.