I was sceptical about a fantasy-themed Five Star game, as it's not really playing to the strengths of the genres. The joy of fantasy is in exploring a new world and immersing yourself in its lore, while in this game a "Shadowlord" and his faceless mooks have somehow conquered a world consisting of five islands and an equally faceless band of heroes is off to stop them, somehow. That said, initially I was pleasantly surprised. The base mechanics are solid. You have a wide range of units to choose from, which gives you a lot of flexibility in designing your army. The details you won't figure out without consulting a manual or the internet, but you don't really need to because everything works more or less as you expect. Over the course of the campaign you can allocate excess gold to research better types of units, gather experience, and pick up heroes and items along the way. But the game kept going. And going. And going. Every new mission was more or less like the last, except occasionally the units got new art and better stats. Not only was this extremely dull, but protracted campaign length lays bare the weaknesses of the Five Star system -- experience is king, and the AI gets it for free while you have to train it up from scratch. As a consequence you have to be constantly on top of your game. It's not enough to win a stage, you have to win it with minimal losses to avoid setting yourself up for failure in the future. The game stops feeling like a game and starts feeling like work. To make it worse, Fantasy General doesn't share the campaign branching system of the other games in the series -- you have to win every single of the fifty or so repetitive, unmemorable stages in a row, or it's game over. The last straw was when I realised that the majority of the stages are not merely uninspired, but are in fact randomly generated. If the designers couldn't be bothered making the levels, you shouldn't bother playing them.
