Etherlords 2

Rating:
Summary: Fun at first, then FRUSTRATING
Review: At first, this is a great game for any collectible card game person. The single player campaigns have great voice acting, resource gathering, and multiple side quests. Multiplayer is also fun, assuming you can find people to play against that aren't way over your league. 3D Graphics and sound are sufficient but they were curiously slow on a lower end P4 2.1ghz.

By biggest gripe is that in the single player campaigns, you usually start by learning the ropes, eventually get a good deck, and have fun fighting varied and challenging NPCs through the first section of the campaign. Then right as you have a great deck and are have some really great spells to cast or creatures to summon, the game starts over with a new campaign "chapter" which erases everything you have obtained... and this chapter is EXTREMEMLY unforgiving. This is my main problem with EL2.

This second chapter, even at the Easy setting, starts you with only the bare minimum cards to have a chance to *maybe* defeat even the first NPC, and then only if you get lucky with your draw. It gets harder with each subsequent fight, not because you didn't assemble your deck right or because you cast the wrong spell at the wrong time, but simply because you're not provided with the right spells or you missed out on a single card on the draw. One chapter gives you nothing but high level summoning cards to start with, which means you have to go idle and skip turn after turn just to cast one of them, usually while the NPC casts enough of their low level cards to form a defense that you can't break through.

Time and time again on this 2nd campaign I simply "Surrender" after the first round, knowing that I didn't get the right draw to defeat the opponent, who's deck you memorize after the first 10 times fighting him. Even the CPU "Auto-Battle" feature can't use those starter decks to beat these NPCs unless it gets a lucky draw.

The single player experience starts out great for the first couple of hours, but eventually becomes a real trial and error save/reload game. It's not really up to your skill or deck building abilities, because you're not offered much of a choice when you start that 2nd chapter. It's just up to the luck of the draw.

This might be true for most collectible card games, but with each save/reload taking over a minute on my system it gets tiring waiting for a semi-decent draw to even bother trying to defeat the opponent.

Rating:
Summary: Worth buying
Review: I bought this game last week and have definitely been enjoying it. The graphics are nice and I havent seen any bugs on Win98 or XP. Basically the game is a COMPLETE rip off of Magic the Gathering, but I love it anyway. You collect spells and creatures and build a 'deck' with them in which you fight other wizards and creatures decks along a rpg storyline. If you like collectible card games or are looking to try a very different type of strategy game, this is for you.

Rating:
Summary: Worth buying
Review: I bought this game last week and have definitely been enjoying it. The graphics are nice and I havent seen any bugs on Win98 or XP. Basically the game is a COMPLETE rip off of Magic the Gathering, but I love it anyway. You collect spells and creatures and build a 'deck' with them in which you fight other wizards and creatures decks along a rpg storyline. If you like collectible card games or are looking to try a very different type of strategy game, this is for you.