Ah, gameplay. This is a game that is a lot of fun some of the time, pretty fun a good bit of the time, and downright tedious every once in a while. Its downfall is that the tediousness sometimes comes sooner rather than later, making the game a drag. It’s too bad, really, because people may stop playing it because of that.
Seven Kingdom II: The Fryhtan War plays much like the bastard child of
Warcraft and
SimCity would -- part grunt rush, part structure building. You play as either the Humans or the Fryhtans, and the two races are wholly different. In my opinion, the game is weighted rather heavily towards the Fryhtans -- which is to be expected, because story-wise, they’ve already taken over a good portion of the world. It makes for rather dull play as the Fryhtans, though, and sometimes exceedingly difficult play as the Humans. It doesn’t help that sometimes the A.I. is better than you wish it’d be -- grunt rushing you at just the worst times, protecting itself at just the best times. Agh. I hearken back to the days where the games had to cheat so that they could have a chance in hell of beating a decent player.
The core gameplay is pretty complex. Say you’re the humans. You start with a Fort next to a city of your race. (There are many, ranging from the Romans to the Indians). If there are natural resources nearby, you’ll want to build a mine there so that you can recover the resources. But you have to make sure that the mine is close enough to your city -- shown by a moving dashed line connecting the city and the mine -- so that it can get workers. If it’s not, you may have to build a city closer to the mine. The same goes with the factories that refine stuff from the mines and the markets that sell stuff from both the mines and the factories. Soon, when you click on a city or structure, you see a web of lines coursing out showing you where everything is coming from and going to. Very neat.
The combat in the game isn’t particularly inventive. Build an army, sortie the various troops, go kick some butt. Pretty typical. This goes for both the Fryhtans and the Humans, actually, although the Fryhtans can generally crush a Human army with a fifth of the troops. Such is the way of evil monsters.
The SimCity-esque stuff is fun, but like SimCity, you hit doldrums where there’s nothing much you can do. For example, in one of the training scenarios, you have to get up to 300 economy. Well, halfway through the scenario (and about an hour after starting it), one of the empires turned itself over to me. Now there was no way I could build economy -- I owned three-fourths of the towns on the map! Oops. But when the objective is combat, Seven Kingdoms II shows its strength. Despite the weak combat system, you have to be extremely judicious with your troops, planning everything in advance, if you’re to survive as a Human. The randomly generated Campaigns are great fun for this, and the pre-made campaigns range from relatively easy to downright impossible. I found myself free-playing Scenarios more often than not, though -- the game was made by a bunch of variable freaks. And as a variable freak myself, I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to make the game exactly as I wanted it to be. Ahh.
