War Wind and the hunch that Warcraft 3 lifted its heroes

The very unit that trudges toward a building to earn its upgrade is what makes one player swear loyalty and another quit on the opening map.

Two reviews, one suspicion about Warcraft 3

Two reviews, written years apart, land on the same suspicion about War Wind: that Warcraft 3 borrowed the idea of heroes who climb the ranks by fighting. The person writing on August 21, 2016 recalls that the game shipped around the same time as Command & Conquer and complains that all the attention went to the successor of Dune 2, sidelining what, in that writer's words, would go on to become the foundation of Blizzard's entire economy. The November 2, 2018 review cuts straight to it: it lines up War Wind's heroes and leaders against those of Warcraft 3 and says it believes one inspired the other. The store's own listing dates its arrival in the catalog to August 18, 2016.

The world these players stepped into is called Yavain: an alien planet on the edge of civil war, where four peoples have shared the same ground, uneasily, for centuries. You pick one of them and see the conflict through its eyes — each with its own strengths, weaknesses, and a distinct way of reacting under computer control. There are 28 ready-made scenarios, plus an editor that lets you build battles and maps from scratch, credited to DreamForge Intertainment and distributed by SNEG.

Between missions you can carry your 8 favorites from one scenario into the next, and every unit earns rank as it trains — which covers stealth movement, creatures reinforced by machinery, and monsters. Victory doesn't hinge on combat alone: you can also win a war by casting spells or striking alliances, and the standing you earn in the field draws wandering heroes in to bolster your ranks. It is this system — a hero who grows, strength that pulls in more strength — that has two people, years apart, pointing at Warcraft 3.

People who still hear the heroes' lines in their heads

Few people have written about War Wind on the store, but those who show up keep hitting the same note. The August 21, 2016 review, posted soon after the game reached the catalog, mentions having signed the petition to bring the title back and vows to buy it again at the first chance. Years later, on August 27, 2021, someone else recalls being given the game by an uncle as a kid, playing for hours on end against the computer, and says the heroes' lines still echo in their head all these years on. The writer from November 12, 2019 calls it a forgotten find: the four campaigns start to feel alike after a while, but each people carries a philosophy of its own — and that, for this person, is reason enough to open the game.

The same people who praise it also point to where it charges a steep price. The November 2, 2018 review is the clearest case: it flags the resemblance between War Wind's heroes and leaders and those of Warcraft 3, but warns that, with 50 warriors on the field, every rank-up demands research done unit by unit — you send them one at a time toward the right building, no shortcut. The June 20, 2017 review piles on another gripe: the latest version dropped the command to cast a spell as a group, so anyone who wants to conjure has to select the mages one by one.

The same idea, turned into a chore

What one review calls a fresh idea, another calls a chore. The June 25, 2017 review takes aim at exactly that per-unit command: to research or heal, you don't open a menu — you walk toward the right building with the right unit and wait your turn in line. Soldiers are hired, not ordered up, and there's no variety of unit types — there's a single base one that gets upgraded bit by bit. For anyone who came to the game without having grown up with it, the review finds the result more tiring than rewarding.

Some remember the game fondly and still describe its coding as rickety: the June 15, 2023 review, written by someone who played as a kid, muddling through, tells of a boat that can strand units with no way back, of an attack order that sometimes just makes the unit stop and stare at the enemy, and of an AI that chases a single target through a fence that kills it off. The Polish review, from June 28, 2025, reports that the game simply won't launch on Windows 11, not even after fiddling with the compatibility settings. The Russian one, from July 16, 2024, describes an image that freezes and a builder command that's hard to land. And the German one, from November 17, 2021, says the version sold by GOG runs worse than the same game on Steam.

For those with patience to spare for the controls

The same gear splits the two camps: asking each unit to walk toward the right building is what makes a hero feel alive to those with patience, and it's the very reason another person quits halfway through the first scenario. Anyone who likes strategy for the story it tells, and doesn't mind steering one unit at a time, will recognize in it why people wrote asking the store to bring the game back. Anyone who just wants to open the game and see an order obeyed on the spot — or simply see the screen come up without an error, on an ordinary machine — will run headlong into the same complaint repeated in Polish, Russian, and German.