Reviewed: November 25, 2003
Reviewed by: Carl Seward

Publisher
Strategy First

Developer
Nival Interactive

Released: October 1, 2003
Genre: Strategy
Players: 8
ESRB: Teen

5
8
5
5
5.5

System Requirements

Your quest for ether dominance begins with a choice of becoming one of four races: the Synthets (part machine, part human), the Chaots (barbarians), Vitals (nature folks), and Kinets (quick and sneaky). Each group has its strengths and weaknesses and your goal is to defeat your enemies via turn-based tactical combat. Both you and your enemy have a certain amount of spells at your disposal but only with the right amount of luck and strategy will you be able to defeat your opponent. You can do this through “campaign mode” where you’re given a set of missions and are able to transverse a dynamic 3D landscape or play one-on-one against somebody sitting next to you or over the internet.

The heart of Etherlords II is its campaign mode. You begin as a fledgling character with a few spells under your belt and a mission to complete. Gameplay is divided into two main sections, “adventure mode”, and the “combat arena”. “Adventure mode” is where you travel along a 3D landscape, collect certain minerals and plants to buy spells, speak to other characters, and find enemies to fight. When you do decide to take on an opponent you’re sent to the “combat arena” where the two of you face off and display your sorcery skills.

My particular task was to stop the Synthets from destroying my homeland. The flimsy plot line was mainly just an excuse to send me on my way to combat nasty creatures. The role-playing elements are minimal at best. You travel around the “adventure map” and watch your character speak stilted and corny dialogue to people of your same race. I believe the aim of it all was to add urgency to the mission and make out that time was factor. Whom are they kidding? My character continually reminded me that she needed to hurry, or that she didn’t have time to go down a certain road because the rusty Synthets were going to destroy some sacred fountain. The truth of the matter was that I could have taken my sweet ol’ time and nothing would’ve changed the outcome. If you defeat the required enemies, you successfully complete your mission, no matter how long it takes.

Combat is what Etherlords II is all about. It’s the backbone of the game. Before you go into combat you’ll have to choose sixteen spells to take with you. There are three types of spells: “creature” (living entities that are summoned to fight for you), “enchantments” (modifies the ability of a creature or the enemy itself), and “sorceries” (instantaneous spells like a lightning bolt). There are brief descriptions for how spells work but I recommend taking the spell for a test run to see how it works in practicality. Sometimes the descriptions aren’t all that conclusive.

Let’s say that you’ve come across a Chaot barbarian and you want to take him on. Once you've chosen your spells, you then enter the “combat arena” where your ultimate goal will be to diminish all of the Chaot’s “life points”. The game begins with being handed a few spells chosen randomly from your “deck” of sixteen. Now each spell requires a certain amount of ether to cast. Let’s say you cast a creature spell and you create a “tick warrior”. That would cost you 4 “ether points”. Each turn you are given a fresh amount of ether points, but any unused ether is wasted. Unless the spell specifies otherwise your creature cannot attack until your next turn. When you’re out of ether points or don’t want to cast any more spells then your turn is over. The Chaot then goes through the same process and chooses to create a “stink rat”. The offensive then switches back to you and now you wish to attack your foe.

Each creature has an attack/defense value. The “tick warrior” has an attack of 2 and a defense of 2. It’ll do two points of damage to any enemy or creature. You double click on your “tick warrior” and it steps towards your opponent, ready to fight. The play then turns back to the Chaot. He has the choice of either blocking the attack with his “stink rat” or taking the 2 points of damage. The stink rat has an attack value of 1 and a defense value as 1. That means if he elects to block the attack his rat would be killed because the “tick warrior” has more attack points than the rat has defense points. In this scenario it would be best for the Chaot to just take the damage and save the rat to fight in another turn.

This is just a fundamental example of how combat works. There are hundreds of spell combinations and it’ll probably take a few, in some cases several tries to achieve success. If your battle drags on, and it often does, you and your foe will start getting life points deducted via electric shocks courtesy of the ether universe. This is where time does become a significant factor and adds a dash of much needed immediacy in defeating your opponent.

The more enemies you defeat the higher your skill level goes and the more ether you receive. The more ether you have at your disposal the more dynamic your spells become. Campaigns are staged in a way where you really won’t have to face an opponent who has a skill level much higher than yours. If you do encounter an opponent that has say, a skill level of six and you have a skill level of three, don’t bother trying to fight. The wide discrepancy probably means you should fight a few more characters to raise your skill level.

After I played the game for only six hours and having slain numerous foes, the whole thing started to become tedious. The pathetic plot lines don’t provide enough motivation to fight the hundreds of creatures needed to complete a campaign. And frankly, combat gets boring after a while. Even with new spells and new monsters to defeat, once you’ve done one combat, you've done them all. Also, once you’ve beaten one kind of creature, you pretty much know their achilles heel and know how to beat them for the rest of the game.

The multiplayer mode provides you with an opportunity to play against a human opponent. You can choose variables such as what kind of creature you want to be, the skill level, and the type of arena you want to fight in. You can play your human opponent via the internet/TCPIP, “hot seat” mode, a LAN connection or Etherlords master server. The only hard part is finding somebody else who would actually want to play such a mundane game with you.

In the “combat arena” I highly recommend setting the “automatic camera” to the max. I don’t even want to think of how redundant combat would become without this option to spice things up. It gives your battle a cinematic feel as your viewpoint sweeps around the arena and zooms in and out of the action. Like the landscapes, the characters in combat mode are also rendered in great detail, complete with little dust clouds as the characters move around.