Warlords Battlecry II

The game is full of the little details that define greatness. If Warlords Battlecry II isn't one of the early leaders for real-time strategy game of the year I'll eat my magical staff.

The very definition of replayability.

Deeper than the Marianas Trench. [June 2002, p.84]

This game has proven to me to be more addictive than cigarettes after all night romps in the hay with my special friend...the most fun I’ve had in playing an RTS since "Dungeon Keeper 2" and "Warcraft 2."

The heroes are a great touch that allows players to gain a feeling of personal attachment to their faction, and to enjoy the character improvement aspect of RPGs.

The game is held back from greatness by a few gameplay issues that sometimes create feelings of repetitiveness (in campaign mode), confusion (losing track of heroes and important characters in battle), and frustration (heroes dying because you cannot locate them in pitched battles, and accidentally misdirecting troops due to erroneous mouse clicking).

Throw in crispier and more colorful graphics and the same decent sound and you've got your game. It's guaranteed to give you plenty of gameplay hours and fun.

It's part turn-based strategy, part role-playing, and part action-oriented real-time strategy wrapped up inside a highly playable design. And best of all -- it's a lot of fun to play.

There should be a warning on this game about it becoming habit-forming, because it certainly is that.

The best part about this sequel is still the RPG-like hero development that so distinguished Warlords Battlecry from other real-time strategy games.

Excellent game balance.

The hero development is well paced and offers great diversity to your heroes as they progress through the game.

If you bought the first one, save yourself the $40 and just pull out the old one again – you won’t be missing anything of consequence.

The interface is one of the best RTS GUIs (for the acronym conscious) to date. There are rollover help messages for just about everything and you can automate the building of units with an endless variety of queue options.

I didn't feel very invested in this game, or its story, but I sat there pouring in the hours just the same. [May 2002, p.93]

The campaign mode simply seems lacking. However, when you get into the groove of things, the challenging AI might be able to keep you busy for a while.

This might be the highest number of gameplay hours you can get out of a single RTS.

By inherently alienating new players in combining two genres, and then providing too little incentive to win over RTS vets, the game becomes more of an upgrade for fans of the franchise, who want to control new races and explore some of the new features.

Just another blip on the RTS radar and is not going to be one of the classics, but its your standard run of the mill nothing fancy RTS.