Warlords Battlecry II

by UBI Soft

Product Features

• Experienc a unique combination of role-playing heroes and real-time strategy gameplay
• New single player campaign with strategic level map
• 12 unique sides and over 100 units and spells
• Persistent hero development
• Up to 12 types of muliplayer games available

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00005YXBV
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1.2 x 7.5 inches
• Media: CD-ROM
• Release Date: March 13, 2002
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #20,426 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

From the Developer

Experience a unique blend of real-time strategy gaming and role-playing fantasy, which allows players to develop heroes through experience in battle. Warlords Battlecry II features persistent heroes that develop over time. Build warrior characters in the Warlord's fantasy world of Etheria. Battle-tested heroes develop into unique classes such as Death Knight, Assassin, or Ice Mage. A new single player campaign delivers 12 unique sides, new terrain, and new magical effects. Create multiple heroes and track their courage in the single player campaign or over the Internet.

Product Description

Experience a unique blend of real-time strategy gaming and role-playing fantasy, which allows players to develop heroes through experience in battle. Warlords Battlecry II features persistent heroes that develop over time. Build warrior characters in the Warlord's fantasy world of Etheria. Battle-tested heroes develop into unique classes such as Death Knight, Assassin, or Ice Mage. A new single player campaign delivers 12 unique sides, new terrain, and new magical effects. Create multiple heroes and track their courage in the single player campaign or over the Internet.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The end-all, be-all of RTS (with a dash of RPG), August 16, 2002

By 

LANCE R LINDLEY "hagakure" (Yokosuka, Japan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Warlords Battlecry II (CD-ROM)

I'm going to put this simply -- because I want to get back to playing Warlords Battlecry 2: THIS GAME ROCKS.

If you like real time strategy games, this one is virtually flawless. It has better-than-average pathfinding, SIMPLIFIED resource gathering (yet still with some tactical gamesmanship involved), extremely varied and challenging races, outstanding pre-scripted AI choices you can assign to each unit (e.g. guardian, aggressive, stand ground, fallback after losing down to 25% of hit points, and scout to name merely a FEW) and adds a role-playing element by having your armies led by a hero who has special abilities, unique skills/classes, and who gains levels and abilities as the game goes on. You can even choose different "modes" for your hero, like Ironman (2x experience, but if he dies, your game is over!), Bronzeman, Tinman and regular. Want to know what those are about? Buy the game and find out. If you like RTS, you won't be disappointed, especially at this new lower price.

Highs: better-than-average pathfinding, streamlined resource-gathering, genuinely varied races (and the chance to eventually lead each race regardless of what race you choose initially), RPG-like heroes, ability to carry high-level units (that you can name yourself) from one battle to the next, many different objectives as you play through a campaign (not just always "kill everybody"), catchy -- but not intrusive -- music, good voice acting in the "audio responses" of your units (barbarians are hilarious), difficulty level adjustable at any time, many "modes" of play to choose from such as Ironman, etc.

Lows: No backstory (doesn't really need one), "just another" RTS -- though one that refines all the aspects of that genre to perfection (still if you don't like RTS, you won't like this one either).

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great RTS with great gameplay, October 16, 2002

By 

Jacob Waltier (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Warlords Battlecry II (CD-ROM)

This game is much better than Warcraft 3. While Warcraft 3 uses a 3d graphical system and looks decent (but sometimes terrible), Battlecry 2 uses 2d graphics that look great and never cause slowdown. Units even create footprints while walking across sand. The hero-building options are really nice. You don't have to choose everything about your hero at first, he or she just develops as you play, and you choose a class, specialization, and abilities/spells. There are a lot of different fantasy races to play, such as humans, undead, two kinds of dwarves, three kinds of elves, daemons, fey, minotaurs, and orcs. The gameplay is smooth and easy to control, and the building interface never gets in the way. It even tells you what you can build or research, and how to make those options available. The resource gathering is very simple as well, with more customization than games like Total Annihilation Kingdoms but less micromanagement than Starcraft or Warcraft 3. All in all, this is a great game that is lots of fun to play, that has a lot of options (and a lot of replay value).

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good for low end computers, March 25, 2002

By 

Athol Kay (Bristol, CT USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Warlords Battlecry II (CD-ROM)

266 Mhz CPU
64 MB RAM
300 MB Disk Space
DirectX 8.1
No 3D accelerator
Win 95/88/ME/2000/XP

Warlords Battlecry was a critical success as a deep game, but not to many gamers warmed to its weak graphics. The sequel largely leaves gameplay untouched and updates to a nicer graphics production. It's not cutting edge stuff by any means as you can tell by the very mild system requirements. Game appears very stable.

The game does boast a lot of depth, and if it's your cup of tea you're going to have a lot of fun for a long time. It has 12 playable races, 20 different hero types, a huge non-linear campaign, 140 different units, 100 spells and a ton of quests. It comes with 50 different skirmish maps, a map editor, fog of war toggles, revealed map toggles, 6 different AI strengths to play against and multiplayer support.

Resource production is a large part of game play. Players need to mine four different kinds of resources; gold, metal, stone and crystal. The map usually clusters one of each kind near the start positions, and sprinkles the rest across the map. The player's hero can covert mines and buildings to player control, and once under player control mining is automatic. Up to eight peon type units can be mass-produced to work in each of the mines to increase production. You will need to build at two central forts to build peons fast enough to staff your mines. Once production of resources is fast enough you'll need 3-4 military buildings pumping out troops to take advantage of the rate of incoming resources. At the same time you'll need to run your hero all over the map converting and reconverting all the essentially indefensible extra mines across the map.

If this all sounds like it should be named Fantasy Resource Production Manager 2 you're correct. Most hardcore players will be ultra familiar with this sort of game opening and if you're sick of it then avoid this game. The good news is that once established buildings can be set to continuously produce units so at least after running your opening book for resource production you can start thinking about having a battle. However after all that hard work the actual battles are rather uninspired affairs. Too quick, devoid of tactics and dull to watch.

The depth angle largely comes from having a hero that increases experience over many games and slowly develops into an awesomely strong unit. Kind of an RPG addition to a RTS game.

There's basically nothing actively wrong with the game. For all intents and purposes it does what it sets out to do, and is executed competently. I think it's only going to appeal to people who played and enjoyed the original Warlords Battlecry though. I really want to give 3.5 stars, but there's no option for that.

Personally I'd suggest you take a look at Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns before you spend money on this. Kohan has a similar theme, but largely removes micromanagement, has better tactical considerations and epic thundering battles. Other options to consider would be Heroes of Might and Magic 4, or even wait a couple of months for Warcraft 3. (Also Warlords Battlecry is out in a Jewelcase version as well, so maybe give that a spin)