A surprisingly enjoyable classic real-time strategy game with action role-playing game elements. This game is very similar to WarCraft II (including even the tone of the worker responses). That being said, it is a good implementation of a tried and true formula, and the necessity to develop your hero and its entourage from level to level is really addictive. Another fun aspect of the game is the presence of "Titans" - singleton units you can build towards the end of the technology tree. These lumbering ceatures can destroy an enemy tower in two blows. Also fun are the air units, like the Human dragon and pegasus. There are no naval units in the game.

Play Hints

Play at no higher than Normal the first time you play a campaign... it will seem too easy when you play the "expect light resistance" scenarios for a while, but you need to do some serious leveling up before you enter even "expect moderate resistance" scenarios.

As the Human race, one way to win the initial levels is to set your barracks to auto-produce pikemen, get all the pikemen improvements, and then systematically pick out one gold mine after the other, converting it and building some towers to defend it.

This will not work on the moderate levels, where you really do need to bring a serious entourage with your heroes; ideally build up some White Mages that you can set to be "Magic Defenders" for each other so they’ll auto-heal the whole group.

It can be hard to figure out what your "command" skill is good for - it gives you more points to take more or stronger units of your retinue into battle.

Be careful not to spend your time taking out a weak close enemy while a more distant enemy grows ever more powerful (there is at least one level in the single-player campaign where focusing on the close enemy is tempting...).

• Beware an enemy bulk attack if there are two or more enemies on the map, like 12 knights - don’t overextend yourself.
• Units regain hit points twice as fast in towers.
• In a long battle, nothing is more important to build than the building that increases your mining efficiency - it pays dividends many times over what it costs then.
• Sometimes you can take out an enemy with a single daemon if you send him straight to that corner (but beware of overextending yourself if there are multiple enemies).
• Observe if your enemies attack each other - if they do, build up your base defenses solid and incrementally gain more. If they don’t the level is much more challenging.

Fun Facts

• You take the hero you built in the single-player campaign into the multi-player games - nice incentive and transition.
• "Dragon fear" is a very fun feature which also occurs as "Titan fear" and "deamon fear" by the way - units appear with one or two red or white spheres and run away rather than attack.
• The tutorial hero was sure made to sound like Arnold Schwarzenegger, so does the Sirian, the human Titan unit.
• Nice touch that you don’t have to have workers going to and from mines (once "converted" they generate resources constantly, just like the tech buildings in Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2.
• The graphics look like 1998 though the game came out in 2002 - what gives? They’re functional but really basic, for example, there is no animation of buildings in progress.
• Has side quests and "sidekicks" that you can take with you similar to Diablo II.
• The medieval music is mood-setting and pretty decent but you can mercifully turn it off and you will after a few hours of play.
• The game on Normal seems way too easy - the enemies wait for you to attack, so just get to a Level 5 palace, get a dragon or two and take them out.
• Lacks some love in details, such as showing a crossed-swords icon for doing a conversion, walking feet for moving an eagle, the go-into-tower icon is an iron clove all of which needlessly leads to confusion.
• I swear the stable look is translated in detail from Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings.
• Units leave footprints in the snow, such as my favorite NPCs the penguins.
• If you walk straight down your character may zigzag in 45 degree angles like an idiot.
• Eagles can build buildings! This is more likely an oversight than game design I’m guessing...
• Heroes seem to be able to convert buildings from an unrealistic distance (ok, so converting a building is inherently unrealistic, but you know what I mean).
• The "new armies are available" sounds wrong "new unit types available" would be more accurate.
• At least in the first three levels on normal mode there seems to be no point in ever building a knight or archer - your hero, pikemen, catapults, and one or a few dragons seem like enough.
• It seems like only the gold resource is an actual limitation in practice, you always seem to have enough of the others.
• Do we really need four resources here? Well, at least if the resource buildings are close to each other as they often are converting one mine will auto-convert the others.
• It seems like you always have to build all the buildings from scratch at least in camapign mode. Since you’re always doing the same thing this gets old fast - what about the building queue concept from the Civilization series?
• "Diseased" units do not re-generate hit points walk very slowly - White Mages can cure them.
• The most fun is to build up a custom entourage and take them with you, rather than mass-spawning ant-like troops and overwhelming the computer.
• I’ve seen it rarely, but the thunder and lightning effects are very well done.
• The waypoint system works very well, so does making a single unit build a number of buildings in succession (use the Shift key).
• You can set units to many different "attitudes" including roaming the map independently - doing that with Eagles really helps if you have to track down that one last enemy unit in a corner somewhere.
• You can play the game in 5 different game speeds, so you can slow down (and even stop) the game to give more precise orders in the heat of battle.

Useful Under-Advertised Keyboard Shortcuts

• ’a’ then left-clicking a destination lets you tell a unit to travel somewhere and attack units in the way (as opposed to blindly get killed by them which is the standard behavior when you send a unit on its way - maybe this should be the default...)

Nitpicks

• Like in some games in the Command & Conquer series, you sometimes have to painstakingly find the very last crossbowman standing under a tree somewhere to be credited with a win - would be nice if the computer opponents resigned.
• If you build buildings too close to each other units will get stuck between them.
• The transition between "light resistance" and "medium resistance" is very sharp.
• Generally, there always seems to be quite some time spent building up your base and then mopping up during every level.
• It may seem impossible to go into stone mines but you can, it’s just that the clickable area is really tiny.
• Pathfining is generally OK on the open maps but in the Serin Jungle level in particular enemy troops can stuck in big swarms.
• The Hero Spell user interface for allocating points can be confusing - you have to go left to right to satisfy the preconditions.
• From a sheer managability standpoint, fewer more powerful units are easier to control than many cheap ones.
• The fog of war lets you see new buildings and a change of ownership in mines once you have explored territory (even when there are none of your units or buildings nearby now). This may well be intentional rather than a bug, but it is, umm, odd.
• Unless you maybe play in the slowest of the five game speeds, there is simply no way in a battle to think of all the spells you could be using, so I never end up using more than three at most.

Differences From Warlords Battlecry

• The addition of the very fun titans.
• The dropping of any pretense of a storyline and the replacement introduction of the strategic map of provinces to conquer.
• The addition of the Fey, Dark Dwarves and Daemon factions.
• You have to "convert" a mine over time rather than just touching it.

External Reviews (highest quality ones listed first)

• The Demo at Adrenaline Vault
• GameSpy Review
• IGN Review
• Adrenaline Vault Review
• Game Nation TV Review
• Armchair Empire review

Other External Links

• Hints and Cheats from GameFAQ
• Sounds Advice from the Gamer’s Temple