Seven Kingdoms 2 HD

I played the demo of Seven Kingdoms II for a really long time as a child, so my enjoyment is clearly fuelled by nostalgia, but I love the different mechanics of this game! Spying, economics, dipomacy... Everything has enough complexity to be interesting, and I find that really fun! However, some things are not really balanced. Some units/powers are much stronger than others, the weapons are completely useless, and some other things. This does not mean I don't enjoy this game, quite the opposite actually! If you're a fan of good old RTS, this one has really intersting mechanics, and it's worth a try!

It's definitively a game with flaws. The balance in the campaign on the higher difficulties is especially broken, since the Frythans will attack you instantly when the level starts and are much more powerful, since the human cultures need to research upgrades first and become stronger over time. Once you manage to defeat the Frythans, you will steamroll over the Eastern Empires, since you have your fully trained heroes and many technologies already researched. I daresay, that beating the initial Frythan onslaugt on highest difficulty is impossible for some cultures. And yet, here I am and once in a while I boot up the game to play a few rounds again and again. I like that every soldier is unique in some way, since the strength and loyality of each individual in your kingdom is tracked and everybody has their own pace of training their leadership and combat prowess. It is up to you to determine the fast learners and promote them to generals in order to train troops even more efficiently. Even more important is to hire capable heroes, which can surpass the limits of ordinary soldiers and make even more capable leaders or powerful fighters with special skills. The espionage system is note too useful in the campaign but can lead to interessting situations if you bribe an enemy general and take over the whole fort or you assassinate the enemy king and your spy gets crowned as the new king, taking over the whole enemy kingdom! Nothing I have ever seen before! I guess this could be much more enjoyable in a PvP game, because the CPU player sucks at infilitration :D So yeah, flawed as it may be, I enjoy coming back, creating my own little stories with my subjects. In some way it is like the storyteller AI in Rimworld, but not as intentional. I would very much like to see a sequel or remake, which improves upon the flaws, AI and maybe add a bit unit variety

Seven Kingdoms is one of those IPs that did not deserve to die. These are unique games with a particular brand of quirky tongue in cheek passive humor. If you don't take things too seriously, you should enjoy learning this game. It is like civilization meets Age of Mythology. The espionage aspect is overpowered as hell to the point where you may prefer playing as a Monster faction just to not deal with it, but you can use it to.

The HD experience is extremely buggy. The original version works just fine, and that is was what I was ultimately after. Will rate up if the bugs get fixed. It's literally unplayable with the HD version.

The graphics look very dated but the gameplay itself still holds up and with resource managment being focused mostly on food/gold it allows the player to focus more on other parts of the game.