Fantasy General II - Invasion

Core game is ok. Once you beat that don't waste money on Onslaught. You have to either to rush to try to get gold to improve units, which leads to unrecoverable deaths(iron maiden), or go slow and have no gold to upgrade. Then they come at you with about three times your units and your units are not much better than theirs. Poor balance, no fun.

Just played a few hours so I will give some first impressions! I am already very attached to my units and every mistake (read: death) will make me reload! The story is engaging and really cool. Characters are well written. I definitely want to see where this goes... UI is super intuitve and you will find all the infos you need at once. Maps are beautiful and give you LOTS of possibilities to win the battle. Playing on Normal difficulity and the AI seems to do a pretty good job (read: lots of deaths = lots of reloads = lots of new tactics to 'solve the riddle') Music is wonderful and fitting for the setting! If you are on the fence about this, consider this: it is a work of love and it is done very well. I can feel that the developers loved the original and truly care about this game! Totally worth your support!

This game tries to build on the old (and golden!) FG1. The music and the art style are imho mostly on point. But where it falls short: - no flavour text - some seemingly random "encounters" with text and decision making try to add flavour, but it doesn´t really work for me - some scripted events are just unfair; reload, try again... - some maps / starting points on a map seem to be generated randomly, some will make the map next to impossible to complete without heavy losses, some make the map too easy But for me, the biggest mistakes were made in unit and mission design. 1) Unit design: "Clutching" a unit, attacking with several units from different sides,.. has next to no no effect in mid to late game. The units´abilities far outweigh any bonus you would receive by any clutch bonus. The bonus you get from some abilities are e.g. +50% damage against certain units, which is .. a lot. 2) mission design: In a game where most units have a movement of ~3 hexes, it is a bad decision to force the player through maps full of rivers and swamps, which hinder your movement extremely, up to a point where you can only move one hex. In a game that absolutely rewards speed and fast mission completion, this is a.. weird design decision. Later in the game, there are abilities / artifacts, that help you move in a swamp, but until then, the game is a chore, not fun.

I think I'm right now in the middle of the campaign and it is really nice so far. Of course I like the stone hurling Trolls the best. Every game should have stone hurling Trolls ;) Fantasy General 2 has similar mechanics as the original, just with much nicer graphics & an actual story. Most people who liked the original should be fine with FG2. On the downside: You do not get to choose your general (you can customize him though) and you do not have research as in the original.

Behind the pretty graphics, decent Battle game play, good interface, there are still a few important things missing from the game. The most important for me: 1 - Only 2 factions in the current game. Need to do way better than that. 2 - No diplomacy, No Allies option. By having only two factions it limits the variety of gameplay you can have especially in the skirmish mode (Skirmish have only a 3 sides max!) 3 - upcoming editor does not include the option to generate a random map and then edit it. You can only make a new map from scratch! Some of us with a busy schedule don’t have time for that. I was hoping the game was going to meet at least the standards set of fantasy turned-based games such as AGE OF WONDERS SHADOW MAGIC, HOMM III GOLD, and WARLORDS III DARKLORDS RISING. all of these games had up to 8 sides to choose, and good diplomacy and Allied choices in Random map generation. I'll wait till the DLCs come out but I am not very impressed so far. :(