So I noticed the other day that Loria is now available at GOG.com including a playable demo which I grabbed and played a bit (now at campaign mission 3; there's also one skirmish map). As of the time of writing this the version is 1.2.0
So far I've got rather mixed feelings about this. The art is generally nice but has a somewhat coarse appearance, lacking the finesse of Warcraft II's sprite work that it tries to imitate. I'd say I prefer the art of Wyrmsun as far as following Warcraft II's footsteps goes. Sound effects are nothing special, and voice acting is fairly neat.
Now onto gameplay. The campaign missions generally do a good job of introducing the playing mechanics, although I must admit that the levelling the hero up would be more highlighted in the first level with some hint messages, perhaps akin to those found in StarCraft. The hero system is similar to that from Warcraft III where your heroes gain experience, level up, and may be resurrected at an altar if you have one. Each hero has four special abilities (some of them passive), with every level up allowing to add one to the active list or upgrade an existing ability. However, unlike WC3, you also need to manually distribute skill points (five per level), which theoretically gives greater control of your hero's buildup.
On top of that, regular units can also gain up to three levels (starting at level 0), which grants them bonuses such as more HP, faster health regeneration rate, a chance to evade attacks, stronger attack etc. As far as I can tell, these are selected at random and without the player's interference. The unit roster if fairly typical for the genre, if not a carbon copy of Warcraft games: you have your footman, archer, cleric, wizard, ballista etc. Same with the base buildings which frankly are not at all different from their WC2 counterparts.
Now how does this all play? After getting through the first missions I had a strong feeling that unit pathfinding is very clunky even by the standards of those authentic 90s era RTSs that Loria pays homage to. Controlling any sizeable group quickly becomes a mess as individual units have trouble getting around one another as well as external obstacles, and sometimes even wander off into a completely different direction. They generally tend to build a kind of formation upon arriving at the destination: melee units in front, archers and clerics at the back; but there is no formation at all when moving, so you can quite easily expose the vulnerable archers and casters to enemy front lines while swordsmen and the hero stagger behind. For this reason I found swordsmen practically useless as they get pelted by enemy archers before they can reach their targets and deal damage.
What's more I've encountered bugs like units suddenly "jumping" to a different place in the middle of combat; this often occurs when the starting hero uses his mace swing special ability. A couple of times my units got stuck in decorations in the starting dungeon, only to "teleport" out of them seconds later.
The hero himself feels rather imbalanced. I thought that he'd make a good tank if I distributed the level-up points properly, but his HP quickly get drained by enemy archer fire, this is no better than regular swordsmen. This is in rather stark contrast to WC3's heroes that are generally more durable if memory serves. On the whole so far I'm finding archers and ballistae the best units of choice, kind of like in WC1.
To add to pathfinding issues, I found it rather difficult to select individual units out of a selected group. There's a little thing with the interface: the units' HP bars that are shown above them by default (can be hidden in the options) change colour in the typical fashion (green -> yellow -> red) depending on how much health is left; however the health bars shown under the unit portraits on the bottom bar interface are always green, making it a bit hard to match the unit on the screen with its portrait, especially in the midst of combat. I mention this because it's apparently easier to click on the portrait to select an individual unit from the group (e.g. to move a unit taking heavy damage out of danger) than to click on the unit itself: several times I failed to select by clicking a unit that was moving; the selection remained on the entire group. This somewhat hampers even the simplest micro tasks.
It appears that other players have also noted the pathfinding issues. I hope these get fixed or at least improved because the game is not bad in itself, even if not exceedingly original. But so far I cannot say that this is an improvement over the Warcraft titles, rather an aspiring imitation.
