Warcraft Adventures - Lord of the Clans

You might remember hearing about Warcraft Adventures; perhaps you've read one of those old Blizzard leaflets, read about it in a game magazine or even saw a trailer on the Starcraft CD. Originally it was going to be released around 1998, but it was cancelled. While rumors say that this was because of the so-called "low market for adventure games", Bill Roper said it was because of quality reasons, that the game felt dated compared to LucastArts' latest game, The Curse of Monkey Island. After playing a beta version myself, I'm gonna have to agree with Bill. It could have been better. A lot better.

The first thing that made me worry about this game was that the animation was done by Animation Magic: They were the same company that made two of those infamous, awful Legend of Zelda games for Philips CD-I, as well as ones like I.M Meen. However, the animation in WA is pretty good, even in close-up situations, and only a few made me cringe, such as the human guard at the beginning. It seems like Animation Magic wanted to go out with a bang, as this was their last work in video games.

As you might have guessed, the game takes place in the Warcraft universe, after the events of Warcraft 2 and Beyond the Dark Portal. You control Thrall, an orcish prisoner who was raised by a human, Lord Blackmoore. Blackmoore intended to use Thrall as a spy who would take over orc armies for him to command. Thrall however refuses to betray his race, so Blackmoore decides to execute him. Instead of waiting for the dawn, Thrall decides that it's finally time to escape, return back to the Horde and reunite the clans to fight the Alliance once again.

The game follows the LucasArts style of adventure games: You can't die, you can't get stuck and the command-interface is similar to the one on Full Throttle and Curse of Monkey Island. Puzzles are okay, and there was only one puzzle where I had to resort to guessing the solution. The game world isn't that big, though, and you only get to visit a handful of places. And, unlike in LucasArts games, the script is very dry and humorless. There's not much talking, either, which seems like a waste of voice talent as they have Clancy Brown (Kurgan from the Highlander) as the voice of Thrall.

As if the overall quality wasn't bad enough, there's the fact that this is a beta version. There's plenty of mistakes and bugs around, from simple animation errors to sound and speech missing, to situations where the game crashes if you look at something in a wrong way. The cut-scenes are also missing, and seems like they either didn't get all the voices recorded, or lot of Thrall's lines are really supposed to be this bland, as there are a lot of standard responses for many actions. For example, look at something and he goes "I see nothing special". Eat something and he says "Not even if I'd starve". Touch something and he thinks "Naaaw". Its almost as bad as in Escape from Delirium. While it does expand the lore of Warcraft, I really don't get to know or interact with the characters as much as I would have wanted to. I did enjoy references to the previous games, and when the game actually did get a bit funny, like meeting the gnomes, seeing their miraculous projects (from flying pigs to chickens as communication devices) and Thrall making a masturbation joke, I laughed out loud.

Overall, the game gets only two out of five. While it looks and sounds okay, the gameplay is really dated and boring and it's no wonder why they never released it. Even if it didn't have any Beta aspects, it would still be bad. The only reason to play this is for the curiosity value.

The version here is a trimmed no-voice version. For the whole version (which is about 600 megabytes), check the ISO-cellar forum section on this