Warcraft III is a game that can be wholeheartedly recommended to most anyone who enjoys PC gaming. The game features superb production values, an engaging single-player campaign that introduces memorable characters and weaves a good story, a challenging skirmish mode, and a highly polished, flexible online multiplayer mode that can keep you busy for months, easily, if not longer. That's of course due to the fact that Warcraft III's four highly distinctive playable factions are all so well designed and so different that players could just as easily spend all their time trying to master one or attempting to learn them all. For good measure, Warcraft III is loaded with Blizzard's sharp sense of style and sense of humor.

Beyond the gameplay itself, Warcraft III represents a major victory for PC gaming in general. At a time when console gaming is generally more popular than PC gaming, Warcraft III stands as proof positive of two things: One, that PC games still do, and for the foreseeable future will continue to do, certain things much better than console games can. And two, that PC games can still be extremely successful commercially, which is important to point out since a number of former PC game developers are concentrating on making console games these days. But the PC gaming market isn't going anywhere if millions of satisfied Warcraft III players have anything to say about it.

Regardless of what message the game might be sending to the industry, though, even at Warcraft III's release in early July, we had a good feeling that it might well go down as one of the company's greatest accomplishments, right up there with classics like Warcraft II, Starcraft, and Diablo. Now that half a year has passed, we're more certain of this than ever, even as we feverishly try to rack up more wins on the Battle.net multiplayer service during every free half hour we have to spare. Warcraft III isn't just the year's definitive real-time strategy game, but in most every respect, it simply is the greatest PC game of the year. In fact, never in GameSpot's seven years of singling out the best choice for our PC Game of the Year award has the decision been this clear-cut.