Warcraft III a second time around is obviously dated but still has some fun despite obvious problems.
General Thoughts and Story:
I'm playing through on hard mode so some of my comments will be tilted towards that mode. My first feeling was that of fun, that was contained throughout the first 3 missions. The charm that blizzard puts into it's games and the character truly is palpable even as you first begin. The graphics even today look great and the polish is still obvious. It's also really great to see the story unfold and remember some of the places that WOW takes you to. You can see WOW unfolding before you in an isometric view and revisit characters and remember places you have traveled. Through the first 3 or 4 missions the hard mode ranges from not challenging at all to ridiculous. Pretty poor implementation of the different levels of play.
After the first 3 or 4 missions I started getting that old feeling of "oh ya, this is what really caused me to disengage from this game". Silly as it may sound, when you have to follow Arthas poor decisions and help him do things you don't agree with, there really comes a point when I was just trying to get through the missions as I no longer cared if he won or not. You begin to see the story unfold and you feel like you are just being used to push the story to the next chapter/mission so you can see more stupid decisions made by Arthas. I really began to check out here and had no feeling of commitment to the story or the world here.
This to me was a poor decision in the design of Warcraft III and really cut off what the movie world would call suspension of disbelief.
Gameplay and Mechanics:
When Warcraft III came out there were many other RTS doing so much more with the genre. Warcraft III in this respect was a setback as it was a dumbed down RTS for the masses. I had played Warcraft, yes on a modem spending time getting modem initialization strings correct, Warcraft II and of course many other RTS during this time. I was excited to see the expansions of thought as there had been so many great ideas implemented in games like Total Annihilation, Age of Empires and others. Sadly, War 3 was dumbed down for the masses as Blizzard went for a more broad approach. Business wise this made sense. For many fans of the series it was a bit of a letdown as you found even some options that were available in Warcraft II missing.
When Blizzard could have introduced something that was truly great like Ensemble studios did that pushed the genre forward with Age of Mythology they went for something different. Ensemble later unfortunately followed the same design scheme of dumbing down their franchise with Age of Empires III and targeted console play didn't have as much luck as Blizzard and eventually disbanded but that's for a different review.
There were some good things introduced like the RPG elements that your heroes had however other games had pulled this off as well and it really wasn't anything new. It did add an additional element to the game though that helped with strategy and depth of play when other parts of the game were seriously dumbed down.
Conclusion
So the game has charm, whit, it's beautiful to look at still after 7 years and it has a story that's mildly interesting. It also is a great game for someone new to real time strategy or anyone looking for some casual fun. The downsides are forcing you to follow a story path that you don't agree with causing you to disengage from the game, missions that are way too easy or way too hard in hard mode and overall lack of game mechanics for an RTS compared to what was available at the time. In a way the whole thing felt like a product placement for the forthcoming WOW. As much as I like Blizzards philosophy and most of their games this one overall was a miss for me. Keep in mind my tilt as I have played many great RTS games and my tilt on the story. If you liked following the corrupt path of Arthas you likely wouldn't be pulled away from it like I was and you most likely should play the Horde if your a WOW player. : )