Wrath Unleashed Updated Impressions

At a press event held today by LucasArts, we were given the opportunity to sit down and play a demo build of Wrath Unleashed, a unique hybrid of strategy and action that is currently in development by The Collective. Wrath Unleashed features four different realms, which are the game's equivalent to races. Each realm is based on one of four elements: fire, earth, water, and wind. Each realm has its own strengths and weaknesses, as well as its own forms of magic and special abilities. The game is played on a map that features hexagonal spaces where your units can move. Your goal is to capture a number of temples that can be found throughout each map, or, if you're feeling more combat-oriented, you can kill your opponent's god character. The game features more than 20 maps in all, as well as a pretty spectacular listing of creatively designed characters to choose from, including gods, demigods, unicorns, giants, genies, dragons, ogres, centaurs, cyclopes, and juggernauts.

Where Wrath Unleashed truly sets itself apart is in its action-oriented style of combat. Encounters with enemies take place when you opt to share a hex-space with an opposing character. Once you engage the enemy, the game will cut you to a new screen featuring a full 3D environment where you and your opponent go at one another in classic fighting-game fashion. Each character has an array of standard combat and magic attacks, as well as a special attack unique to that character's unit class. Not every character can match up against every other character, since some will be woefully underpowered when compared to some of the bigger units. However, this can occasionally work to your advantage, as one of the better strategies can often be to sacrifice a couple of pawn units to greatly weaken a stronger unit, such as a demigod, and then move in for the kill with one of your own bigger units.

Furthermore, the maps' various degrees of terrain can play a huge factor in your advantage in a fight. Each realm has one type of terrain that it is best suited for and two types that it functions well enough on, and the rest are all insufferable. The key is to try to engage enemies on terrain where they are at their weakest and where traps found throughout each area affect them most. For instance, if a fire realm character is engaged on a glacier, he'll be vulnerable to ice storms and similar perils, whereas if a water character is similarly engaged, it will be immune to those types of traps. The terrain changes depending on which realms you select at the beginning of the game, and it's randomized each time, though the overall layout of the map stays the same.

Wrath Unleashed features a number of gameplay options to choose from, both single- and multiplayer. The game's primary mode is the battle mode, which, in effect, is the standard game we previously described. In addition to that, you'll also have a versus mode, a team versus mode, and a single-player campaign. The versus mode strips out all of the strategy elements from the game and just lets you pick any characters from any of the different realms and pit them against one another in standard fighting-game fashion. Team battle works similarly, but instead of just two opponents, you'll be building squads based on a points system, where weaker units take fewer points, and stronger units take more points. This keeps the game balanced and prevents users from taking 10 demigods against a group of unicorns. The game's single-player campaign will feature 13 different missions in all.

Wrath Unleashed is currently in development for both the Xbox and PlayStation 2 and is slated for an October release. We'll have more information on Wrath Unleashed in the near future.