hen I say that War of the Ring is a clone of WarCraft, I mean it from the bottom of my heart. The differences between this title and the Blizzard series that spawned a genre are minor, and almost uniformly bad.
The most glaring deficiency in this title is in the variety of units and factions. There are only two options of who to play as, and neither is comparable to anything in current RTS titles. Even legendary heroes such as Aragorn and Legolas are less exciting to use than those found in WarCraft III.
AI, both for your own units and for enemy players, is simply awful. That, along with loose control due to the scarcity of hotkeys, makes coordinating battles a very frustrating exercise. Too often units would slip out from under my eyes and do something asinine – choose idiotic targets on an attack-move command; walk around their target before engaging it; the list goes on and on.
These flaws cheapen strategy to where the genre was five years ago: Build a horde of units and stomp. While this is fun to an extent, the deeper experiences found in the competition are far more enthralling than this bland slugfest. The graphics are definitely top dog in the RTS pack, with several very well-done tilesets and nice spell animations. Unfortunately, the art is the only step forward WOTR makes; in every other category it lags way behind.