As others commented, its a mostly faithful remake of the original game... "mostly". The hex map is really nice. The combats and 3D units look amazing (arrows actually arcing throught he sky; dead figures staying where they died while the rest of the unit walks away and continues fighting). But there are several things I just can't get past: * The UI scales with whatever resolution you put the game in. So if a menu takes up 20% of the screen, it'll take up 20% of the screen no matter if you're running in 800x600 or 2560x1440. I cannot play in 4K res because the menus get so gigantic I need to sit 6 ft away from the screen to not get a headache so its just a complete waste of screen size. If you want an example of a game that works brilliantly in 4K resolution, look at Total Annihilation, which is amazing considering it came out in 1997, before 4K resolutions existed. A menu that is 100 pixels across should be 100 pixels across no matter what your resolution is. * All unrest modifies being % based. This completely changes the dynamic of the game, and early game strategies that worked in the original now don't (park your swordman+spearman in starting city, crank tax rate up to 2 gold/person, get no rest until city becomes size 5, then reduce it to 1.5 gold/person). Instead of unrest being easy to quell in small cities and getting more of a problem in large cities, its now the opposite. * Related to above, the fact that you start with a Swordsman+Settler instead of Swordsman+Spearmen, and settling a city produces a free Swordsman out of thin air. Again this seems like a trivial change, but completely invalidates early game strategies we are used to. All in all its really unclear who they were catering to. If fans of the original game, some of us are annoyed by some of the rule changes. If new fans who never played the original game, they are annoyed by lack of features that were introduced in other 4X games in the 25 years since the original game came out.
Its easy to try to compare this against BI2+3 which are some of my favourite games, but you can't, its wildly different other than some familiarity with the unit names (like you know what a ranger, buggy, skull, samurai are from the previous games). GoG have done a great job with the installer. I own the original game, and tried and failed to get it to install on modern Windows. Even older GoG downloads would install but then not configure or play correctly and would really irritate me that it seemed to re-test all the screen resolutions every time you fire it up, thereby screwing up all the other windows of other things I'm already running on my PC at the time. The latest one I tried works perfectly, even in 4K resolution and then looks awesome, but see some notes here to get 4k working here - https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Battle_Isle:_The_Andosia_War Its a bit of steep learning curve trying to manage 6 resources (which I compare against other games like TA, Warcraft, etc which have 1-2 or at most 3) and trying to complete missions before you run out of resources is genuinely difficult in some places. But it works really well once you are used to it, and love the researching and upgrading units. Even knowing exactly what to do, the enemy still surprises you and drops off units and knocks out your energy relays exactly where you don't expect him to, so you have to react to situations fast but also plan several turns in advance for what units you will need where, as it takes a long time to build them and ship them to the other island. I feel I should play the game all the way through and make notes about what I did wrong and the surprises the enemy pulls on you so I know what to do better next time. Only negative I will give it is the economy / military island logistics don't really work so well multiplayer (if you can even find someone to try to play multiplayer with). So I more enjoy it for the single player campaign which is much better thought out.
Unlike it seems most reviews on here, I came straight from playing TA for years to trying SC2, and found it amazing. The graphics are incredible and with multi-monitor support as someone else noted, the controls are easy to get used to, everything just makes sense and works. The research tree works completely differently to TA, but loved it after I got used to it. And the AI is actually a good challenge. The only reason I'm giving it at 3* is because for all this, there's no multiplayer in this version, which for a modern game like this is terrible, and versions elsewhere of the same game DO have multiplayer, and that makes it feel very much like buying the version here was a waste. So then especially given all the reviews saying SC1+FA is so much better, and has multiplayer, I bought that and tried it. I couldn't get on with it at all. By comparison it looks terrible, the camera panning is weird, the unit controls are weird, the research progression is completely whacky. So yes while I agree with everybody saying SC1 and SC2 are vastly different games, I wouldn't be so quick to just say SC1 was better and SC2 is worse. Its just down to whichever one you like the playstyle of more. For me I found SC1 was unplayable compared to SC2.
I've still got my original CDs of the CD (DOS) version and the "Collectors edition" (which pretty sure is the Windows version people here refer to as the 1998 version) but the DOS version while it runs OK in DosBox, runs at terrible resolution, looks blocky, has limited joystick support, and I would agree for the DOS version with other comments here saying it just doesn't cut it anymore. The windows version wouldn't install on 64 bit OS because of the 16 bit installer, and while a fellow online had done a lot of work to try to make a workable installer for it, I never had any success with it. So thought I'd give the version here a go. Installed the 1998 version and... wait its as easy as that? My monitor is running at 4K resolution, and sure of course the cutscenes and 3d textures are pretty blurry/blocky from being massively upscaled, but considering this was written to run in 320x200 on a 15" screen, its totally playable and looks better than I expected. And can map all 12 buttons and POV hat on my joystick to controls (tho that's a bit tedious)
