A shittier reskin of an already existing campaign.
This looked really good when I first opened it up. Original designs? A whole new sub-race? Focusing on the Forsaken? Wow! I prepared myself to be impressed. I was not. In fact, such was the level of my disappointment that I had to stop lurking and create a whole account just to air my many, many grievances with this map. What's so sad about this is it's obvious that a lot of work was put into this map, but all that's ruined because of the complete lack of thought put in. It's just manpower, there's no design or originality.
Let's start with the most obvious one. This is the Rexxar campaign, nearly mission for mission, except it's been stripped of any storytelling, plotline or character, and a bunch of the missions have been duplicated. The vast majority of the important, memorable missions are reskinned from the bonus campaign, with slight changes like the positioning of the camps (whao). The very first thing I'm greeted with when I enter the game is Sylvanas giving me the "earn my keep" quest where I have to complete 3 odd jobs so we can proceed. The missions were slightly different I think, but so forgettable I don't even remember what they were. I think one of them was to kill a dreadlord. I don't really remember. What I do remember is that it took me more time to traverse the needlessly huge map than it did to actually complete the damn things. The similarities keep happening, too. The final two missions are the exact same as the ones in the bonus campaign, but redesigned to be less enjoyable.
So then what happens after you finish that? You have to make another round trip through the map (ugh) so you can do the important work that is... completing more odd jobs. For hours. There is hours worth of play time that is invested in completing jobs for random undead units that take less time than the walking between them. And you're constantly passing through creep camps who are too dangerous to run through (especially the ones that stun) but too easy and boring to enjoy fighting one on one. And even if you've defeated them once, they'll spawn back the exact same way just so that next time you pass through this area you'll have to defeat the same creep miniboss all over again, even though you've already proved that you can beat it and are getting kind of sick of granite golems. The creeps don't even make sense. There's no thematic consistency, especially in the early levels. Why are there four elementals standing six yards away from an army of kobolds? Next to them are a bunch of wraiths and undead. Then there are some golems, and now some bandits. What? It feels like someone just upended a mixed bag of "assorted creeps" and let it all work itself out. It makes no sense, and it's a pain to battle through. And the map is huge, holy shit. I made the mistake of combing through the first map pretty thoroughly before moving on because I thought, just like the Rexxar campaign, there would be neat little secrets and side quests hidden within. It made sense, why else is the map so huge? But no. It's literally just there so your greatest enemy will be your short little legs, and the map doesn't even have rune of speed drops like the campaign it's ripping off which might have made it slightly more bearable.
There were a couple of good missions, actually. I'm probably doing it a disservice by ripping into it so broadly and generally. The mission in the temple where you had to kill a bunch of mages in the first act was interesting and had some original concepts, and the quest to kill the summoner was fantastic! If this campaign was just those two missions, it would be great. Unfortunately to get to these interesting parts, you have to go through SO MUCH WALKING. The optional gryphon quest was the worst offender. The whole mission is to walk to three corners of a map to destroy a couple of nearly unguarded gryphon nests. The mission is incredibly easy, but it took forever because I kept walking the wrong way, or fighting through a creep camp I'd already killed 5 or 6 times, or getting interrupted by a bunch of high-armour, low-attack gryphons who presented no threat but took forever to kill. And leaving them wasn't an option, otherwise I'd be trying to fight while surrounded by twenty gryphons I'd neglected to kill.
Most of the missions were BAD. You have some generic "kill X" missions. You can't really go wrong with those, they're more or less the same no matter how many times you make them. They get very boring if nothing new is introduced though. And it really isn't. It doesn't matter if I'm fighting the wolf assholes or the dwarves or the scourge or the orcs, they're all the same and by the fourth or fifth I just wanted to get on with it. They barely introduce any new concepts or anything. There's the stun-happy dwarves, but they're just annoying. The other main source of mission is "destroy X base." Also not fun after the eighth repeat. I liked it the first few times, I did not once it became obvious I was just repeating the mission I'd just completed. And of course there's the fun business of running around through the map. I keep bringing it up because that's the memory that is burned into my skull more than anything else. But I digress. The third type of mission is a "defend the base" type of mission. These were actually quite enjoyable. It was annoying that the only difficult part of most of them was making sure I was healing the person I had to keep alive, and sometimes enemies got stuck behind trees and I had to find them and kill them to progress, but they weren't bad. Probably because there weren't 80 of them. If the campaign was stripped of all the superfluous missions, it would be way more fun.
But the bad design comes to its peak when we get to the third act. Oh boy. This thing. I hated this thing. It has three missions. The first is the last mission in the Rexxar campaign, reskinned, again. Sylvanas has a base, the Worgen have a base (and two strikeforces). Sylvanas tells you that she'll be in charge of the defense, while you lead an assault. This is the greatest lie I've ever heard come out of her mouth, and she was the one who killed Garithos after promising to free his people in the original game. She is so unbelievably, ludicrously incompetent and worthless that it was easier to just let the entire base die and complete the game exclusively with my heroes, with no semblance of teamwork between us. I was waiting the entire mission for me to stage my inevitable coup and overthrow her, since she was clearly not capable of leading. Unfortunately that never happened. I think it was a glitch that allowed a couple of buildings of the base to survive after I abandoned it for greener pastures, but I didn't care.
So let me tell you about the actual battle. At this point, I have reached ~hero invincibility~. I am essentially unkillable, as long as I pay attention. My heroes have so much summoning buffer from my sludges, such strong healing abilities, and so much mana regen that it wasn't a struggle to stay alive at all. No matter the size of the army I just needed to approach it sensibly and it would be defeated. But, and this is the key point, I did actually need to focus on the army. And something I noticed is that these Worgen may not have enough DPS to kill me, but they have more than enough armour to keep me occupied, and they breed like rabbits. I was not fighting an army. I was a single exterminator trying to systematically wipe out a colony of rats. I'd take out one army and before the minute was up they had made another for me to deal with. It wasn't a matter of surviving. It was a matter of keeping the damn things dead long enough so that I could actually start destroying buildings and other important stuff. Their armies were so huge they could not all attack me at once. You had giant platoons of Worgen patiently waiting in line to have a swing at me, and I had to wipe all of them out to destroy even a single building before they came back. It was not hard. It was hard labour. It was a chore.
What next? It's the "destroy battleships using 3 battleships, two frigates and a transport ship". There is nothing to separate this mission from the Rexxar one, except less nifty stuff like the mercenary camp. It's the same mission, cut and paste. Not much more to say about it.
So then we get to what I assume was the final mission. I didn't complete it because it had the exact same problems as the last battle mission, and I didn't feel like grinding any more. It's the DOTA-esque mission from A Blaze of Glory, but the design is godawful. It has some serious balance issues. Sylvanas has three bases, but they're utterly worthless. An army of undead can barely kill a single Worgen knight with a healer. If you are not present in the bases at all times, they will die, and they will die at an unprecedented speed. You don't have any way to fast warp between bases like you do in A Blaze of Glory (if you have one of the secret items) and the map contains none of the little passageways that allow you to walk between these bases in less than a few minutes. You essentially have to station the heroes in the base at all times to ensure that someone doesn't sneak-kill them while you're out doing something productive, because by the time you've walked all the way back to the central base and into the passages that lead to the other two, half the base is already destroyed. And even then you simply can't kill them fast enough. The assault never lets up, either. The gap between waves is so small it might as well be an unending assault.
"That's just part of the difficulty!" I hear you cry. Well, no, not really. The truth is the map would be really easy if I just decided to squat my heroes in the central base and left the two on the sides to be destroyed. As I said before, I have reached invincibility. The worgen simply cannot kill me. It can't be done. And as long as I take the inglorious duty of mopping the floor, I'll win the game eventually. I could probably even send my melee hero out with the undead army to speed things up and it would still be fine. But I'm not going to do that, because that's boring. Even more so than walking through a map for 10 minutes to get to my next quest. There's no challenge to it. I don't have to adapt, I don't have to think. It's all sitting there periodically pressing Q, E and R when the cooldowns run off, and maybe even W if I feel particularly funky. I don't want to do that. A mission where I have to sit for hours in a base exterminating rodents and doing Sylvanas' job for her while abominations slowly whittle away distant buildings does not sound like my idea of a good time.
It wouldn't be hard to fix, either. Add some more paths between the three bases to cut down travel time. Make the worgen stronger and Sylvanas' army MUCH stronger so that Sylvanas can still put up a fight without my help, and the worgen actually pose a threat to me. That way it would feel like a cooperation, rather than a mission that I could honestly complete on my own just fine even if "no deaths" was a condition, but I'm hampered by my incompetent and suicidal "allies." With regards to the entire campaign, cut out the boring parts. This mission is a repeat? Get rid of it. Make the maps smaller, or add something interesting in the maps to justify their large size. Add fast travel. Make creep camps respawn smaller after their first defeat so you don't have to do the same thing over and over again. Choose creep camps that make sense thematically. Focus on a single story so you aren't just doing arbitrary odd jobs. Give the characters some personality. THINK about what you're making.
I like the worgen, and I like the new designs and units. I just wish the gameplay lived up to it.
Tl;dr: Just play the official Bonus campaign, it's the same but better.