Maximo is back and ready for action.

Maximo vs. Army of Zin is the follow-up to last year's Maximo: Ghosts to Glory. The new entry in the franchise is being developed in the States by the team who crafted the original game. The developers have set out to address the issues players had with the original game and introduce a host of new gameplay and story elements to give the franchise a more unique identity. We recently took a look at an early build of the game to see how it's coming together.

The sequel's story picks up pretty much where the original left off, with the unlikely duo of Maximo and Grim searching for Maximo's love, Sophia. The search takes a bizarre detour when Maximo encounters a strange clockwork foe. While Maximo isn't hip to what's going on, the game manages to keep you better informed than the soon-to-be-challenged hero. The creature is a member of the Army of Zin mentioned in the game's title. This army of the undead is actually powered by compressed souls who've been nabbed by the evil forces, unnaturally warped, and stuck into the soldiers as undead Energizers. It seems the last time the army was around was 500 years before the game starts, when it appeared and started laying siege to humanity, as most evil armies do. In your typical movie-style last-minute save, the forces of humankind united and defeated the army, à la The Lord of the Rings. Unfortunately, given the army's power supply, it wasn't completely vanquished. The compressed souls allow the forces to reconstitute themselves, making them pretty much undefeatable. Eager to wrap things up and get back to normal life, the forces of humankind tossed the army into a vault, locking it away presumably for good, and called it a day. Sadly, tales of the great battle and the army faded into the mists of time and became ancient legends that no one really paid attention to. Fast-forward to the present day, when Maximo gets a crash course on the Army of Zin and begins a cool new adventure.

The Army of Zin is menacing indeed.

If you played the first Maximo, you should be right at home with the sequel. The game's basic control is as solid as the original's, but it's also quite a bit more flexible. You'll start out with a wider range of starting moves and soon gain access to a much broader array of attacks, thanks to a revamped combat system. In his latest adventure, Maximo will have access to a new combo system and be able to modify attacks using the D pad. Additionally, your repertoire of abilities will be boosted regularly by a new power-up system, and you'll also be able to retain the abilities you've collected when you die, which does away with one of the original game's most troublesome elements.