Warlock 2 is a game that reminds me a lot of Eador, for all the good and bad that that entails. Wheras Eador was a longer form, more complicated game that thrived in it's campaign but was plagued by bugs, balancing issues and repetative tedium, Warlock 2 is much shorter-form - even me as an inexperienced, completely new player was able to finish an entire game in a few hours - but also lacks a lot of staying power and personality compared to Eador.
I'll start with the things I liked because they're few enough that I can get them all stated right from the off. the game looks nice, the art is well done, the concept of warring through shards of broken worlds to conquer and claim victory is also a good concept, and I liked a lot of the ideas behind the story and characters... and that's about it. The "story" is about a paragraph long, both campaigns combined, and has barely any staying power or interest. Plot points (such as the United one in the Naga campaign) are brought up once and then discarded, enemy Ai have almost no personality whatsoever (assuming they live long enough for you to even meet them, which tends to be a crapshoot), and the "quest" system is so simplistic and pointless as to be entirely without merit. If you get a quest to kill a unit, you can say yes and get a reward, or say no and... the unit will still spawn in, and you just won't get a reward. A lot of incidental dialogue the player is allowed to give can directly reference the United One... even when you're not playing that campaign, and it's not your goal to kill him, and the diplomacy system is so basic and rudimentary that the game won't even give you a message to let you know someone has declared war on you.
Speaking of the campaign itself, it's laughably done. In the main campaign you get three pop up events, of which only the second (involving finding a unique spell to cast) has anything interesting going on whatsoever, as the other two are just "hey we spawned in some minion camps/big minions, go kill them" before the entire story just... stops. No events, no dialogue, no interaction, until you make your way to the final world where some dude just goes "oh hi, you'll have to break my fort to get to the main dude", which isn't exactly hard - before the game drops the final obstacle on you and completely breaks the balance of the game in four, by spawning four incredibly overpowered, massively tanky, way too strong mega units that LITERALLY cannot die unless you kill them in a specific order (and the game doesn't bug out and constantly respawn the one that you're allowed to kill who is making them all immortal), while they start cleaving through your army like it's nothing. The second campaign is actively worse, as you're constantly being terraformed into an ocean (which nobody except the naga can do anything with) every 20 turns or so, compounding one of the main issues the game has *even more*, until you go to the main continent and, surprise surprise, kill a super OP, overstatted hyper unit that will self-resurrect if you don't kill him fast enough, while he's also taking about ~20% of the damage from your attacks.
The game constantly spawns monster camps, not in the fog of war like a good game might, but literally inside your city borders, or directly next to them, no matter what - mandating a constant garrison prescence to repeatedly and consistently clear out every single camp that ever spawns, or they'll conquer your cities. This extreme constant pressure is what I can only assume is created entirely because the actual enemy AI in this game is laughable. They literally can't deal with the monsters, at all, and get stuck or even killed on their starter worlds 99% of the time, leading to the game basically being whack-a-mole against endlessly respawning red dragons while you are able to go about your objective almost entirely unopposed.
The more I think about it, the more this game seems like it wasn't even slightly cooked. While I liked the core concepts and the ideas, the execution is so far removed from good that It just has no staying power at all. The balance is all over the place, the AI is too busy being killed by the monsters to pose a threat, the campaigns are either annoying or laughably overtuned, and the game even impliments a *city cap*, in case you wanted to have fun expanding (yes I know about the "special cities", but they're so awful and useless that they're not even worth building). I genuinely cannot fathom why this game was released this way, when it's so clearly lacking in so many places. Hell, you can't even tab out without the game slowing all your typing down to a crawl! It's been so long since I've played a game that seemed like someone tore the beating heart out of it before it even got off the ground, but that is definitely Warlock 2. As much as it has problems, I'd recommend Eador over this in a heartbeat - because even while it had a lot of problems, it got a lot more right than this game did. Don't waste your time with this, it's really not worth it.
