The Dark Tide (TDT) is a single player campaign that takes place after the last campaign of the Frozen Throne. The story begins when the heroes from the "previous" campaigns are needed once more to destroy several demonical portals that have been constructed in the corrupted woods of the night elven lands, little do they know at this time though, that their quest has only just begun.
About the gameplay of this campaign, it is basically like Blizzard's own campaigns where you need to construct a base with the use of your workers. Afterwards you need to harvest resources (gold and lumber), and when you got enough resources you are to train different kind of soldier units that are needed to guard your own base and destroy the enemy base. This type of gameplay is a bit old nowadays, since every melee map and most blizzards campaigns has a gameplay that's pretty much just like this. I think it would be fun to see some sort of new gameplay element(s) to make this feel more refreshing than playing, rather than something people have played for years.
The terrain of TDT is average and it wouldn't hurt to add some environmental doodads such as flowers, bushes, shrubs (etc.) here and there, especially in the forest areas. Another terraining element that TDT lacks is height variation, and a lot of places were completely or almost completely flat. Another thing that I noted was the lack of tile-variation at certain places. I also noticed the Lordaeron Summer was used, which I suggest replacing with the Village tileset, which looks a lot better but has the same kind of tiles. Apart from those already-mentioned things, the terrain is approvable.
There isn't really much to say about the music and sounds used in the campaigns. They were the same ones that comes with Warcraft 3. Whilst this mustn't be a bad thing, nowadays, it usually is as people have heard this music in different maps for years now, and as this is a campaign and there isn't really a maximum file size I suggest importing some custom music (basically everything that has been said about music goes for sound effects as well).
The Object Editor work was the worst part of this campaign, in my opinion. The units, buildings, abilities, upgrades etc. were all the same as blizzard uses in their campaigns, which makes this feel even less custom from playing one of blizzard's campaigns or just playing regular melee. I suggest adding new units to the races, ditching some of the old units, giving the heroes new spells, basically adding more custom stuff to, as mentioned above, make this feel like something new instead of like something old.
About the cinematic's of the campaign, they were lacking overall and the camera work nor the dialogs weren't that good. The music wasn't that fitting either. Some of the cinematic's were also bugged like the end cinematic of the first chapter where you could see that there were two sets of the same heroes on the map at the same time. My only suggestion regarding cinematic's would be to watch other cinematic's to get the hang of how you should make your own.
All in all, it didn't feel as though I wrote much positive in my review, and because of minor flaws in basically all areas and because of the fact that this campaign neither had custom units, buildings or anything custom at all and felt very much like a worse version of blizzard's campaigns, I don't think this is ready for approval in it's current state.
2/5 (Lacking) and voted for disapproval.
Approved
