Etherlords II (PC)

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Format - PC
Release Date: Q3, 2003
Publisher: Strategy First
Website: www.etherlords.com

In Etherlords II, you're a duellist on a quest in a fantasy realm - the usual Role Playing Game (RPG) idea.
To begin with, you have a selection of 16 spells. The spells you have are dependent on the path you choose in the single-player mission, namely Life and forests, or mountains and destruction.

For this first peek into the Etherworld I chose to play Life and the initial spells were tiny creatures and plants, like ticks and fungus. These were augmented with a few spells to make things more powerful for eg. a spell to add to my defences and spells to prevent other, less powerful creatures from attacking me.

To start with you wander around the world, until you meet up with an opponent. It's easy to take a measure of an opponent's strengths and life total by right clicking on them. You can then decide if you want to go into battle with them.

Players then take turns putting out creatures or spells to help take down the opposing player. If the players get deadlocked in battle, an Ether Storm begins - lightning comes out of nowhere to strike yourself and your opponent each round. This helps to end games that have stagnated as it adds a ceratin strategy. You can gain life and shore up your defences against the Storm, hile trying to use the Ether Storm to take your opponent out over time.

The control system for exploring the world is a bit sensitive by default. If you touch too close to the side of the screen the view rotates drastically. It is tweakable, but not doesn't make much of a difference.
Camera angles could have been better as well by allowing you to rotate around the Z axis, but as there are no surprise attacks (you always have the option to back out of combat before it begins) this isn't a big problem.

If you're after a a graphical beauty to show off the capabilities of your monster system this won't deliver. Graphics-wise, you're not seeing something as advanced as you will have over the last year. Although, the game is more focused towards excellent gameplay and battle systems and this makes it ideal for older systems.

Audio is basic too. There's no background music to speak of, the voice acting sounds a bit forced and the generic sounds for casting manage to feel like a collection of clip-audio, but overall the sound is inobtrusive.

On to the game play and the strongest draw of Etherlords 2, its unique combat system - turnbased strategy. Unfortunately, the game ultimately feels like a very long drawn-out game of scissors-paper-rock due to the ability to quick-save anywhere in the game at anytime outside of combat. I found myself approaching battle with a variety of creatures, entering battle to find my selection of spells mismatched and promptly getting whupped in short order by the superior method of combat.
Then I'd reload to my quicksave, modify my selection of spells specifically to defeat that opponent's method of combat and then rush in for the kill.

For example, I went into combat with my "speed" selection - all small creatures
with some enchantments to modify their strength. I faced an opponent who used only walls (creatures that cannot attack, but have a high defense). An entire selection of walls. For every critter I pumped out, he created 2 walls. Frustrated I hit my QuickLoad button, swapped out my mini-creatures for flying creatures (flying critters can only be blocked by flyers, funnily enough) went back into the battle, and proudly buzzed my army of bees over the tops of my opponents walls for the kill!

There's a multiplayer component as well to allow you to face off against combatants online. This is a bit better as instead of facing down a computer with a set stack of spells, you're going against an intelligent being who can adjust to strategy.
Games are best of 3, with the ability to swap out spells in between games to adapt to your opponents play style.

If you're into collectable card games like Magic: The Gathering or if you're interested in an innovative and challenging battle system - pick up this game. For a casual gamer its a joy. You open it up, fight one, maybe two battles, save your progress and move on with your day having gotten the enjoyment of a few battles.

System Requirements
Minimum
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- OS: Windows 98/ME/2000/XP (Windows 95/NT not supported), DirectX 8.1 or higher
- CPU: 600 MHz Intel Pentium III or AMD Athlon processor
- RAM: 128 MB
- Video: 16 MB AGP video card using the Nvidia Riva TNT2, GeForce; ATI Radeon 7500; 3dfx Voodoo 4 or more recent chipset with DirectX 8.1 compatible driver
- CD/DVD-ROM speed: 8x
- Hard Drive Space: 1.5 GB free hard disk space plus space for saved games and Windows swap-file
- Sound: DirectX compatible PCI 16-bit sound card

Recommended
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- OS: Windows 98/ME/2000/XP (Windows 95/NT not supported), DirectX 8.1 or higher
- CPU: 1.0 GHz Intel Pentium III or AMD Athlon processor
- RAM: 256 MB or more
- Video: 32 MB AGP video card using Nvidia GeForce 2 or ATI Radeon 8500, or more recent chip sets
- Hard Drive Space: 2 GB of free hard disk space

Note: Some PCs equipped with video cards based on ATI Radeon 9700 and 9700Pro
chipset might encounter problems with EtherlordsII.

Additionally, the following specifications are required for multiplayer:

- 28Kbps modem (minimum)
- 56Kbps or faster direct Internet connection or DSL (recommended)