Warlords: Battlecry II

The Good
This game has twelve different races, each with their own set of units (although some races share the same basic units), meaning that playing against different races ends up with applying different tactics. Each race requires different amounts of various resources (High Elves require diamond, Daemons require diamond and gold for training units and stone for building etc) which means that you have to be careful of your resouces, and mines and quarries which you use can sometimes totally run out of gold. The tech tree, while not being that complicated, does give you improvements which can actually be useful. Another interesting point about ths game is the hero development. You can choose a class with certain abilities then choose a sub-class with different spells up for grabs. Unfortunately this doesn't work perfectly since some spells are more useful than others (really high-level characters are able to summon whole armies at a time). The music is also quite good. While being great, you can sometimes have this jolly-sounding music playing as you smite the enemy, which does not work as well considering the fact that games like Age of Mythology managed this perfectly.

The Bad
The main campaign is not set around a story, but it is a map of a world call "Etheria". This map is divided into about sixy provinces which you must take in the form of skirmishes. On this screen revolts may start up and mercenaries may offer your help. This part of the game works fine, it is just everything else that is dodgey. No matter who you play as (apart from High Elves) the High Elves will always dominate the map, and encounters in provinces will remain the same no matter who owns it. The difficulty of capturing a prvince is labelled before you start the battle, yet for some reason anything of "Moderate" difficulty is nigh on impossible to capture, even on the "Easy" setting. The cartoony animation and drawing is also particularly cheesy. So, like I said above, like Warcraft III, only worse.

The Bottom Line
If you've finished Warcraft III and its expansion pack and bonus maps and multiplayer games and brilliant role-playing elements and fantastic story-driven campaign then you might just want to play this for a brief spell. It won't shock you with any brilliance, but it is at least a distraction.