At first sight, this game seems to be another Age of Empires clone. Actually, is a hugely complex strategic experience.
It’s so complex that the tutorial has 8 full-scale missions, which are as hard as a standard advanced level campaign. It’s so complex that it’s impossible for me to cover every feature of the game in this review, so I will throw in a little example, which I think it’s representative of the whole.
In the standard civilization strategy game, if you’re in need of a peasant because you want to build some building, you just click on your town hall structure and train all the peasants you fancy. It doesn’t matter if your peasants get killed, or transformed by an evil warlock into a letterbox: since you have an unlimited supply of them, they are expendable; go and train another ones. This is completely wrong in Seven Kingdoms II. It’s so wrong that you don’t even have a town hall facility at all.
In every scenario, you will notice some white squares all along the map. Those are towns that are neutral to the political and military forces that are colliding in the scenario. Every one of these towns has a preset amount of people living in them. You can convert those neutral towns to your cause.
You’ll always have a special unit that is called the king, who has all its statistics already at maximum. If you order your king to stay a while in a fort, the surrounding towns will accept to be subjugated by you because of the presence of the king. But, since the king can’t be in two places at the same time, the loyalty of the people where he’s absent will be reduced and they shall suddenly rebel, so you could contemplate the option of accelerating the process of converting new population by granting money to them. Once you’ve accomplished the conversion, your flag will float over the town and you can use its population for everything you need; but here comes another interesting feature of the game.
As I said earlier, you don’t have an unlimited supply of peasants. You only got a preset amount of people for every town, which could be sixty people or ten. If somehow you need more people, you’ll have to adjoin another town, or wait until your peasant population has babies (and when I say “wait”, I said it literally). Your population is classified into peasants and workers. Every building you construct needs an amount of workers in order to run properly: the ore mines, the factories, the research facilities, the religious facilities, and even your soldiers count as workers. Workers have a constant loyalty of 100%, no matter what happens, so you don’t need to worry about it anymore; but they don’t buy the goods you manufacture on your markets (which is your only way of getting any income), and especially they don’t breed. If nobody buys things at the markets, you won’t have any money; if people don’t breed, you won’t have nobody to further working or researching or fighting or replacing dead units. On the other hand, peasants do buy goods and do breed themselves, but their loyalty is erratic and they rebel a lot when they don’t like the state of the things or the king is long absent. The problem, as you can see, is that you desperately need workers; but you also need desperately peasants: you can’t turn every single peasant into a worker and you can’t avoid employing people. Sure, you can always add more towns to your domain in order to avoid these conflicts, but the people will only work in nearby buildings: people from Frisco won’t work in Philly. And that without including the nationality problem: every town in the map is from a different race, and you can’t mix them. You can’t send people from an Egyptian settlement to reinforce the population of a Chinese town in crises. Every time you start a scenario, you will face these stresses, and a main key to victory is precisely to know how to manage wisely your preset and scarce human resources.
While in other games you just click on the train button and only worry about how many food units are left (if you’re not playing Dune or Command and Conquer, because they don’t have any farm facility at all), in Seven Kingdoms II you must think carefully if you can really afford one single footman or a new facility. If you noticed, I just talked about the most simple and overlooked feature of the mechanics of every strategy game: the provision of working force for your settlement. The rest of the game features also have a lot of innovations, and all of them point to complex and enrich the standard. Every kingdom has its unique building stylings, its unique special units and its unique characteristics. Your units have a tiny character sheet with skills that could be improved through experience, and you can promote them from private to general to effectively manage and decentralize the political affairs of the game. Your religious facility gives you special bonuses that are unique to every race, and can summon a god creature that’s also unique to every race (the Normans summon an archangel, the Chinese summon the unicorn dragon Chi Lin). Every campaign is completely different, but I haven’t figured out if you have one preset campaign for every race or if it’s randomized every time you begin. In every scenario, to wipe your foes out is not enough to win: sometimes you must also accomplish some demographic objectives as a certain population or commerce size. Likewise, if you are subjugating a town from the same nationality of your counterpart, it could happen to you that its population and soldier units may treason you and became enemy troops in the middle of the heat of war.
And, if that weren’t much already, you can also play as Fryhtans, the beasties nation, who have a completely different set of rules than humans: humans can’t breed people and must rely on the computer calculations and the reactions of peasants; fryhtans can breed units, although with a limit. Humans are penalized if they kill any civilian; fryhtans are given awards for that.
To sum up, it’s unquestionable that Seven Kingdoms II borrows a lot of things from previous games. It has the feel and the basics of Age of Empires. It has a couple of rules and the political system of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms series. It has the demographic objectives from Impressions games (Caesar, Pharaoh, Zeus). In between levels, a kingdom map comes that shows you the global progress of the war in a way very similar to Westwood strategy games. But Seven Kingdoms II is the jewel it is because it is a fine piece of craftsmanship. Trevor Chan has put together a series of very good ideas that were previously sparse and not fully developed, and he managed to create a superb, unique, and very challenging game. The only drawback I can think of it it’s that its complexity can get very overwhelming for some players; especially when you’re playing the tutorial missions, whose difficulty are far from being tutorial. But, in spite of that, Seven Kingdoms II is really a must-have; and you certainly have to consider buying it if you’re desperately looking for a different game. In an era where companies keep infinitely cloning one single plain standard, it’s very good to see from time to time a game that gives one (or two) steps forward, like this one.