Fantasy General II - Invasion

At first game seems good, but then it starts to feel like it lacks depth. Also game communicates things that are happening poorly, which some times causes you wonder if thing a bug or was it meant to happen. Game has good mechanical base for great strategy game but currently it feels that it does not have enough meat to held interest for longer period of time.

First off I want to say I'm not a fantasy general veteran, in fact I can't even remember playing the original game. So I went into it pretty blind. So my review is based on that. I bought the game because I watched a bit of lets plays and thought it looked interesting and the reviews both here and on Steam were amazingly high, so I took a shot at it and normally for me with any sort of strategy game my first activity is to go to the skirmish and multiplayer modes (if applicable) to see what is on offer. Right there was the major let down. The way they sold the skirmish mode quite honestly underdelivers massively. Which makes me think that the primary feature of the game is the campaign and it is primarily pitched at fans of the original and not really anyone else. While I haven't touched the campaign yet the skirmish is very shallow and not even remotely worth anywhere near what the asking price is. The campaign might be good but paying $57 AUD for just a campaign of a not-particularly deep game is not at all worth it. Moreover on the Steam forums the devs mentioned that there was play by email support, which might exist but all of the multiplayer is locked behind "online-only" DRM. Which is my final gripe. I buy games on GOG to avoid DRM, even with multiplayer (Remember offline LANS? I do) and an increasing number of their releases are relying on online services to facilitate multiplayer. For this game you have to login to "GOG" service (Which can't be done offline) or Slitherine which is a straight login. Despite the fact that a game like this would normally have a hotseat mode or could implement play by email in a way that does not require a login. For now I'd say hold off on purchasing this and/or wait until it's heavily discounted.

I'm a big fan of the original and though I'm only a few scenarios in I felt like dropping a review. The interface and performance are vastly improved over the original, also it seems a lot more beginner friendly than the original which was balls hard. Music, graphics and gameplay seem really nice. If you are on the fence about this one give it a shot!

This game still has me hooked after almost 100 hours. Solid gameplay, interesting story and mostly-okay UI. The different units are good and weak at the things you would expect from their descriptions and stats, and it's a fun puzzle to figure out how to best break a cluster of enemies with the right sequence of attacks. The upgrade trees are also fun to explore, and it's good that you can spend surplus resources on training existing troops to give them new buffs. Oh yeah, and scouting really matters. My niggles: - The map should really be able to zoom out more and not lag so much. The graphics are so relatively simple that it really shouldn't be be an issue on a modern PC. - You can't set units as done for the round, so it becomes a hassle to find the units that still have moves when moving a large army. - It's bloody annoying finding and assigning items to units. - On the minimap, it's impossible to tell used from fresh units, and the same for explored and unexplored locations.