Disciples II: Servants of the Dark Review

Disciples II: Dark Prophecy is a turn based strategy game in which you play the role of one of four races struggling for survival and dominance of your war torn world. You will create armies to conquer and control territory, hire powerful mages and warriors, develop your fledgeling cities, and lead your race to glory. Using a careful balance of diplomacy, resource management, magic and military might, you will strive to etch your name in long and bloody history of Nevendarr.

This game franchise has long been the standard for fantasy turn based strategy games. It was a fine mix of nice game mechanics, with beautiful graphics and excellent sound effects, that provided an always enjoyable gaming session. The add ons, Servants of the Dark and Guardians of the light allow the players to play either the evil races in Dark, or the Good races in Guardians. The stand alone expansions do include the Campaigns from Award winning Disciples 2, Dark Prophecy game.

In this expansion, you can command one of the four races of the dark side of the disciples world. Each of the four are working towards different victory conditions. The Legions of the damned, for example, are striving to spread a deadly plague over all the lands of Nevendaar, and they also are trying to steal the power of the reborn Elven god. The Undead Horde, lead by Mortis, seeks revenge on her back from dead husband, Gallean, and she doesn't care whom or what is destroyed to get at him.

This expansion includes a large number of bug fixes and game play corrections, and also attempts to widen the scope of the original game. In this regard, the game is a bit disappointing, as more could certainly have been added to increase the value of this title.

One problem that is quite troublesome is that the game map is not very 'clean,' you can easily miss enemies and opprotunies as you march about the country side. The new campaigns are nice, but a lot of space was devoted to the original game, so little was left over for the new games. This was done because your character must complete the original campaigns before they can venture into the new material. Unless your completely familiar with this game system, you really should play the original campaigns anyway, as the tutorial is very minimal.

The strength of this game is the visuals, the characters are presented as painted shields, and as excellent animation when engaged in battle. The artwork is both stunning and original, and makes some of the tedious game play worthwhile. The game maps include the usual collection of towns and villages, as well as castles and keeps, all the things that we have come to expect from the fantasy genre.