This is very decent game severly crippled by horrible user interface. I can't count number of times i had to reload the battle because i misclicked something. And misclicking here occurs often because this game has almost no keyboard shortcust, the usage of mouse itself is awkward and uninuitive and visual indicators and hint on what is going on the screen is almost utterly lacking. I will play it to the end anyways because i really like the atmosphere, mechanics and combat, however the UI is so bad it makes you wonder if devs even tried to play this game themselves... Even games released in 90s like Fallout 2 had easier controls.
I've always been weirdly in love with War Wind. Despite clumsy UI, some bugs and not so great gameplay, the game itself was very enthralling. The huge part of it is definitely thanks to it's very unique and interesting setting: the world Yavaun, inhabited by four, vastly different, but inter-dependent races, that makes you really want to explore it, learn more of its history and take part in it. War Wind 2 keeps all the clumsiness of previous part, while mostly losing most of what making it's predecessor good. The core idea of the game is introducing your old good humans as the "new" race to this interesting, strange, complex world. Did it really needed it? Even worse, the humans are represented not as one, but as two factions - Marines (ie jocks/bullies) and Descendants (nerds/scientists). Both are very boring and generic, first one wants to bully everyone else why other wants to get back. They have such exciting original units like jeep, gun car or security guard. In the meantime the other two factions have been created by mishmashing old four races into two factions (tharoon+oblinox => Imperium or something, eagra + shamali = S.U.N.). The end result is that instead of 4 fully-fleshed and diverse factions from War Wind 1, we got 2 boring and generic human factions and 2 mish-mashed, noncohesive "alien" ones. This takes away a lot of magic and atmosphere of original War Wind. The gameplay itself isn't better in any way to it's predecessor. Campaigns are boring and uninteresting, missions are meh. You have some choices along the way and there are few "special" characters, but just as the factions they are incredibly uninteresting. E.g. a pair of magical apes, pair of magical twins, redneck woman with shotgun who in some campaigns you can kill, in another exchange 1 sentence. To sum up: if you love and miss War Wind, you might still want to play this game and have some nostalgia-driven enjoyment there. If you are just looking for a good game, this is not the one.
Not sure if its GOG version or something else, but despite installing this Mode, the skin is not available...
