Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos Official Strategy Guide

Comment: This is a good strategy guide, it really helps your game once you get into the tougher missions by helping you to find things you most likely would have never found without looking at this. I give it 4 stars because it would have been really worth the buy if it was in color, its hard to see the pictures, but aside from that, its a great guide for only 10 bucks. Really good to have if your new to the game and havent beaten the campaign yet.

Comment: This guide is excellent for getting through the single player campaign missions. The information about each race and their units is very detailed. It helped me through some tuff spots in the game and showed me more I can do than what I already knew. The only downside is the lack of multiplayer tips and tricks.

Comment: Grading just on the basis of a guide, this book would have received 5 stars easily. The failing in this case is not in the guide, but in the game: Warcraft III is not sufficiently difficult to justify spending hard-earned money on a strategy guide. There are certain missions that one may get stuck on, but after trying again once or twice, most players should be able to figure out each mission's 'trick' strategy and beat it with relative ease. This applies even to hard mode, which, with the exception of a few missions late into the third and fourth campaigns, is not very hard at all.

That said, this guide is a walkthrough, in every sense of the word. It tells you what structures/units are available (and, most importantly, which ones you should use), shows you the entire map from overhead complete with a suggested path to follow, and what pitfalls need avoiding on a certain missions. After I had beaten the game several times on my own, taking a look through the walkthrough I noticed several ingenious strategies or shortcuts that I had never thought of that would have saved me a few hours of aggravation. And of course, it gives you a fairly good summary of unit tactics and general strategy, such as scouting, creeping, etc. to use on Battle.net. Like most guides, however, this one is not designed to make you the perfect B.net player, so most of the in-depth strategy and tactics must be gleaned from websites such as warcraftiii.net

It is an excellent guide, so if you have the money to spare and need a quick way out of that inanely annoying mission you're replaying for the 30th time, this is a good buy. But if you can stand a little trial and error, I doubt you'll need help to the degree to which this book offers it.

Comment: Bought this for my husband for Christmas. I couldn't believe how nice the graphics and color were. I personally can't stand these games because they take so long to play (it's solitaire and Mah Jongg for me), but my husband called me over just to look at it, and it's pretty neat. Guess I won't be seeing him for another 6 months while he plays it...

Comment: Overall I would say the book is very complete. I have found very little about Warcraft III that was not answered in this book. This book has two parts.

The first part is the game play detail. This part provides details such as damage, armor, range, hit points for every unit and building; a "tech tree" for each race; and details about the special abilities of the heros. This part is essential for any serious player.

The second part is a pure spoiler for the single player missions. It gives every detail about the missions including: items, enemies, power ups, and tactical strategies. This part would be most useful to younger players or those who are new to strategy games.

I personally do not enjoy the single player game nearly so much as the multi-player game. I have owned the game for 6 months now, and have not-yet finished the single player game. Conversly, I have played over 200 online games.

I would recommend this Strategy guide to two types of people: those who are serious about developing a winning strategy (using the first part of the book), and those who are new to strategy games and may have trouble completing the single player missions (who would use the second part of the book).