Who remembers nowadays all those real-time strategy games of several years ago, when games like Warcraft and Command & Conquer were worshipped as cult because they made us play 'till the next morning? Sometimes I install such a golden oldie to experience the nostalgy about those times once again. But once in a while there still appears a game that takes us seven years back in time. A game like Horde 2 for example...

From the Russian 7bit Lab we may soon expect Horde 2 (also called 'Horde 2: The Citadel' ). Some readers may be hearing bells ring when I say that Buka Entertainment is the publisher. Buka, mostly known of 'Echelon' and the upcoming 'Paradise Cracked', gives it a shot at the real-time strategy market which is at times overly saturated.

If this is Horde 2, where is Horde 1 then? Well, that was ‘Horde: The Northern Wind’, also made by 7bit Lab. 'The Horde' exists too but that’s a game from another publisher than Buka and dates back from very long ago.

Horde 2 is loosely based on Russian folk stories and the locations have a clear Russian influence. The story is quite cliché: a cruel warlord (called Teimour) wants to enslave everyone to his rule and you’re the one to stop him. Don’t be surprised, but there are also wizards and dragons involved (thanks for the warning or we would have had a heartattack - red.). That’s everything you need to know because you won’t get real missions or assignments. The player just has to try to conquer the worldmap in order to defeat the warlord. Easier said than done of course.

I click on ‘New Game’ in the main menu and I can choose between Erik, Oleg or Igor to be the leader of my people. The difference between them is that each of them starts at another location on the worldmap. That same worldmap is divided in numerous squares, which all represent a location. On every location there will be other realms with which you can wage war or make peace and this is the first positive aspect about Horde 2; diplomacy. It’s definitely not too well worked out, but it makes the games less common place. Instead of just always killing everyone, you can now let enemies kill each other first.

If you travel from location to location (by sending your leader to the side of a map), you will constantly meet new friends and enemies. Once again it is a pity that there are no other stances except peace or war. A little more options here would have been great. Another negative thing is that after the transition to another map you can’t see both locations at once. What happens on the map where you have left and have built a stronghold is left out of the game till you come back there. In that way I came back after a while to the first map and two of the three AI-players were eradicated by the third AI-player. Luckily my stronghold was still there or else Igor would have gone crazy!

An immediate point of remark is the ‘odd’ interface. For example: if you select multiple units, this will give a little, green square around each of these units so you can see that you are able to give them orders. But if I send the units away, then the squares disappear and there comes a white flag above the head of the leader of the group. Combine this with the fact that combat-situations are quite uncontrollable and confusing and you have an extra irritation (yes, there are more). You get used to it after a while, but the question remains if everyone will bear those curiosities. The whole interface is a bit oldfashioned and looks at times much like the Warcraft 2-interface, what doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s a bad thing.

Despite the interface I found the interactivity of the scenery pretty refreshing: forests will catch fire if you shoot fire-arrows at them, rocks fall off mountains, chests and stone bottles can be smashed to pieces after which a reward (or punishment) will appear, you can dig pitfalls, etc.. There are by the way also things you really have never seen in a Medieval RTS (trees that jump and then radiate deadly waves, the earth which really swallows units, sneezing monsters which sit in trees and never come out but which can kill eight workmen that are passing by, etc.). Some of these new inventions can sometimes be ridiculous; a genie from a bottle who can kill all the units of the enemy in an instant or who takes all your gold.

That last fact can be very annoying if you know that gold is one of the four important 'resources' in Horde 2. The three others are metal, wood and the population. Gold and metal are easy to get if you place mines on the veins and you still get wood by chopping trees. These three resources are raised by taxes from time to time. Your army is also paid automatically with gold. Too bad that you never know when and with how much gold each time this happens (same thing for taxes, you can't get access to what you are demanding from your people). The population increases when you place more and more farms.

Qua graphics Horde 2 certainly doesn't satisfy (eg. 800x600 is the only available resolution) and that's still the understatement of the year. Gamers who are used to 3D-engines of titles as Generals and Warcraft 3, won't believe what they get to see here. The simplistic design and the poor unit-animation make the whole picture look even more worse. Sure, great graphics shouldn't always be a must but this is less than decent and even Warcraft 2 had better graphics.

But it's not all that bad, because how would the artificial intelligence (not unimportant in a RTS) be in this game? Well, the ennemy can sure kick ass. Big land assaults are very common here. Why I wasn't crushed at the first time time then? (something we are wondering about that too - red.) One answer: the defense towers are so cheap and easy to repair that you can build an unimpenetrable fortress in no time. The computer does it too and that means that defeating a certain opponent is really hard. Because of these towers (which you can take over just like other enemy buildings) with walls around them not even an army of 100 soldiers is able to break through. You could fight till all the resources on the map are depleted but then one should have a lot of patience and time. The best thing is to proceed to another map to see how business goes there.

The AI of your own units is unfortunately a lot worse. There are a lot of pathfinding problems and units won't listen always if you order them to retreat. And that while Total Annihilation and Dark Reign already gave a good example of how it should be about six years ago. Of course, not every developer has the same budget with which those two classics were made and in theory the AI could be improved because I played only the beta-version.

And how is the sound and music? Hmm, the sound can be called at all times pretty mediocre with as ultimate downfall the invisible, sneezing treemonsters. Only the background noise of the natural environment was decent. Music then... or not? Woops, it appears there is no in-game music, only the main menu and the intro offer a constantly repeating track. I say it again; things like these could still be added so it's not the end of the world (yet).

The units themselves don't have any innovations worth mentioning except for some (like the fire-arrow shooting archer) and they all are the same as the other players. Only the units of Teimour have different looks, like the Mongoles of Khublai Khan in their days of glory.
Further there are little options and in-game information (aside from the worldmap which gives enough information of the areas). I also didn't see a multiplayer- nor a skirmish- option. The official site states that multiplayer via e-mail with Hotseat should be possible, but how that's going to be possible with a RTS would be a good question for 7bit Lab.

As conclusion I can say that Horde 2 left me behind with more than just mixed feelings, some things are anno 2003 just not acceptable while there were also things that surprised me in a positive way. I have to admit that I didn't play the game entirely so I couldn't get a chance to see more magic (or dragons) at work but I fear that, even when I would have gotten further in the game, it wouldn't have changed much to this temporal conclusion. This is quite a negative preview, but I can only hope that the people of 7bit Lab learn their lessons from this kind of previews. The setting (you don't see games based on Russian folk stories every day), the interactivity, the diplomacy and the urge for conquest are all great things about Horde 2 but still these don't compensate enough for the negative things. The real-time strategy business of these days is used to a lot more impressive standards. I hope for Buka and 7bit Lab that they can still make improvements to the final version of the game or else a lot of gamers will leave Horde 2 on the shelves.