Object Software's Dragon Throne: Battle of Red Cliffs is the sequel to Fate of the Dragon. Both are real-time strategy games that take place during the legendary Three Kingdoms era in ancient China. Like Fate of the Dragon before it, Dragon Throne is a strategy game that uses somewhat simple 2D graphics and has full speech in Chinese. And like Fate of the Dragon, Dragon Throne is a decent enough game, but there are better real-time strategy games that you can spend your time and money on.

Dragon Throne lets you choose from three legendary warlords.

Dragon Throne takes place in the ancient China made famous by Luo Guanzhong's Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a historical novel that chronicles the battle for control of China between three of its most powerful warlords: Liu Bei, Sun Quan, and Cao Cao. Then again, so did Fate of the Dragon. Dragon Throne uses the same game engine and graphics as the previous game--you'd probably have trouble telling the two games apart at a glance. In both games, as with most other real-time strategy games, you start with a group of peasants, whom you command to gather resources and construct buildings that will let you gather an army to send after your opponents' peasants, buildings, and armies. And just like in Fate of the Dragon, the 2D graphics of Dragon Throne seem a bit plain--all of the game's units, including peasants, soldiers, and heroes, are tiny onscreen. The sequel's buildings, which include peasant farms, weapon workshops, and infantry barracks, are fairly detailed, but everything in the game is drawn using a drab, earthy color palette that doesn't seem to do justice to the colorful historical setting.

As you might have already guessed, Dragon Throne also sounds pretty much the same as Fate of the Dragon. The original Fate of the Dragon had two language options for audio speech: English and Chinese. Dragon Throne has only Chinese speech, though you can choose English subtitles. The game's voice acting is quite good, but unless you're fluent in Chinese (or attempting to learn the language), you'll probably end up ignoring it entirely. As with Fate of the Dragon, Dragon Throne's synth-instrumental soundtracks combine traditional Chinese folk music with more upbeat rhythms. The music is well suited to the game, though it isn't particularly memorable.

Unfortunately, it has the same buildings and units as Fate of the Dragon.

Does Dragon Throne also play the same as Fate of the Dragon? Yes, it does. In both games, as with most other real-time strategy games, you must recruit peasants to build a base of operations, then create an army to crush your enemies. And Dragon Throne more or less has the same base building and combat as the previous game. You recruit peasants to build houses to increase your population limit, farms to grow food, barracks to create soldiers, and mechanical workshops to build siege engines--it's all quite similar to other real-time strategy games you may have played. As in Fate of the Dragon, your infantry comes from training peasants at a barracks. The one interesting new feature that the sequel has is that soldiers can revert back to peasants in times of peace. In other words, instead of having soldiers standing about idly in times of peace, you can assign them peasant work. This occasionally comes in handy during longer campaigns, in which your armies have to travel long distances to fight and will gradually run low on strength (provided by food and wine, which your peasants can produce or carry in slow-moving supply wagons). So, the new feature simply allows you to build a new base of operations so you don't have to walk all the way back home to replenish your strength.