Myth: The Fallen Lords

The Good
Myth is a new spin on real-time fantasy tactical games. Your army fights the undead on the hills, valleys, and plains of the land, and have archers, knights, bombers, vikings, and other troops in your army. There are 20 missions of varying difficulty, some with twists to perform, like "laying a landmine trap" with bombs placed on the ground, or keeping a knight around home base to look for undead warriors sneaking up from behind.

So what's the spin? The spin is that all this happens on a 3D landscape. You can rotate the map and zoom in and out, in realtime, during the battle.

There are nicely animated cutscenes (animated, not rendered for a change). There is also a good online tutorial on learning the controls of the game.

Finally, the ability to record games, both standalone and networked, leads to some really satisfying replays, as you can adjust the distance and rotation of the landscape during the replay. (Networked game recordings even include the text messages sent from one player to the other.)

The Bad
There are, I'm sad to say, numerous problems with Myth:

Myth was designed by a company that cut its teeth on the Macintosh. As such, Myth was designed with a single-button mouse in mind, and that leads to some annoying control issues. Band selection vs. single selection, the absence of the industry-standard "right-click menu" for actions, and other annoying problems really detract from the game. (Disclaimer: The sequel, Myth II, solves some of the control issues.)

You can't save your game in the middle of a battle. Since some battles require 10 minutes of preperation and can last 15-25 minutes each, this can get really frustrating when you make a stupid mistake and have to go through the entire 10-minute preperation again.

While each mission has an objective listed at the beginning of the game, it is not always clear what needs to be done. Or, more specifically, when you fail a mission, it's not clear why! Again, very frustrating on longer missions.

Finally, the first two or three missions are the only "easy" ones. After that, the games gets uber-freaky difficult to play.

The Bottom Line
Since the sequel corrects many of the problems in Myth, I'd go for the sequel.