Disciples II: Guardians of the Light

It's the start of my turn, and time for me to attack some undead scum.

Guardians of the Light and Servants of the Dark are two companion packs that expand on the Disciples II game and campaigns. Although they are officially classed as ‘expansion packs’ they do not in fact require the original Disciples II game to run and, as both a blessing and a curse, both packs have the entire Disciples II campaigns, maps and character roster within them - which means that newcomers to the world of Disciples II can jump right in with one of these packs and see everything there is to offer. This includes the tried and tested formula of turn-based strategy, plenty of adversaries, a perfectly adequate multiplayer mode and a whole lot of leveling up.

Of course, the problem with this is that unless there are plenty of additional features to these packs, the incentive for an owner of Disciples II to buy either of them is rather limited. Unfortunately, there really aren’t that many new features at all.

Back to their roots

Here's the Mountain Clans unit that I'm currently moving.

The original game itself, Disciples II, is an incredibly polished and visually appealing experience. Using sprites rendered from 3D CG models the detail in both animation and effects is excellent, although having to wait for each animation to end each time you initiate a move does begin to irritate. This is in keeping with the style of game however that has no qualms about borrowing a tried and tested formula from Heroes of Might and Magic, where you command forces made up of separate units that can each contain multiple troops.

The game casts you as the commander of a specific race, giving you the chance to play as the Empire, a morally strong (normally) human race; the Mountain Clans, a dwarven race that although good consider friendly relations with anyone a rarity; the Undead Hordes, which most likely do not need an explanation (think zombies) and the forces of the Legion of the Damned, who are just as evil although more demonic in nature than the Undead.

Bring honour to our tribe

Mid battle, causing damage. You can perform most normal RPG status changes such as poison and paralyze.

Your objectives will vary between missions and races, but the original campaigns are blessed with an FMV opening describing the entire situation that requires your specific talents. As the game proper starts you will need to choose a hero to lead you in battle and help you take over foreign cities and thereby grow your boundaries.

Each hero can be chosen from a list of a few different types. One specialises in fighting, one in magic and others have various other skills and you will normally hire a troop of fighters (up to five, depending on your hero’s upgradeable leadership skills) to help battle with him. These heroes can move around independently and level up like their troops as they defeat more enemies. Strangely there is a cap put on each hero’s level during each mission, which will often keep your heroes below level 10 - despite the fact that your other minions can increase their level all the way up to level 99. That said, you will be hard pushed to level up much anyway because of the relative lack of experience points on offer, which brings up another problem.

One man wonder

Deep in the bowels of the Legions of the Damned, the Empire fight for survival.

I’ve found myself completing levels with a single unit for two reasons. Firstly, if you have one unit fighting all the battles, they will become stronger than they would otherwise and can subsequently win these battles more easily and therefore finish a mission. Secondly, at the end of each mission you are allowed to take only one single hero (not even their troops) with you and five items you have collected over the course of that mission. This means that you will start your next mission with one hero who has a reasonably decent level and are forced to hire more heroes (all costing plenty of your precious gold) that start back at level 1. All of who then have to be trained up by fighting - fruitlessly of course since you can then only bring one hero to the next mission anyway.

All of this seems to make the various stats and other RPG features in the game largely irrelevant since you know that you will only ever be able to use one of your heroes again in a subsequent mission.

Holding up well

Equipping items can give you certain benefits, or you can just use them to smite your enemies.

Although the main game was released last year it has still held up well to current releases and I certainly enjoyed playing the original campaign. The characters all have decent sound effects, screaming when killed or chanting when casting a spell, and the music is nothing if not cinematic, with new music for these expansions. An afternoon can easily be squandered spending plenty of turns trying to take back a city that you’ve spent money upgrading the defences of only to have the enemy’s most powerful unit take it and turn that benefit against you, which bodes well for the long term durability of the game and is further enhanced by the multiplayer features.

The satisfaction of ending each turn a little closer to overcoming the enemy or achieving your goals is a consistently enjoyable feeling, although this hasn’t changed from the original Disciples II which this review isn’t even meant to be focusing on. Instead, taking into account the fact that the game is included with each pack, let’s take a look at the specifics of the expansions.

New and improved

Upgrading your units and other special allowances are unlocked through building up your home castle.

Perhaps the most significant enhancement to the original is the addition of an ‘auto resolve’ feature when in battle mode. This will basically play out how the battle will most likely go in just a few seconds, which is very useful if you want to skip through very hard or very easy battles where you are confident of the outcome. However labelling this as the most important new feature doesn’t bode well for the rest of the pack. Comprising two new high-level campaigns (one for the Empire and one for the Mountain Clans) you’ll have an immensely difficult time working through them, and when you do each mission only has a text briefing, compared to the FMV intros of the original game.

The inclusion of a scenario editor does expand your potential missions significantly though and with people releasing their work online you probably won’t run out of mindless battles to attempt, although there is a ‘random map generator’ if you find yourself devoid of inspiration and this does create a rather good looking map nine times out of ten, although the actual difficulty level balancing has to be done manually.

Guardians of the Light

Each tribe's land looks different. This belongs to the Mountain Clans, and it obviously dominates the map.

The two new high-level campaigns are pretty good continuations of the original Disciples II campaigns for the races in question. In fact they start with the ending sequences of the originals to give you a bit of back story (or simply remind you of them if you’ve beaten them yourself). On the second level of the mountain clans campaign however I found myself stuck with no obvious solution and discovered, via the official forums, that only by installing a patch could I fix the problem. Certainly I do not begrudge games for requiring patches for small bugs that couldn’t be caught in limited internal testing, but when a bug prevents continuation through the game itself it’s rather less forgivable.

In the whole of the two new campaigns there are but three new characters to battle, and you have no new units at your disposal. As an expansion, giving us more maps that can be created just as well using the random map generator, a little extra music, a feature to speed up your battles and an ‘exclusive portfolio containing original concept art and sketches’ seems a bit much for the price tag.

Still a good buy

A rather intense battle. I'm definitely going to lose though unfortunately. Auto resolve won't help me now!

Even with the rather limited additions to the game, I can’t help but recommend Disciples II: Guardians of the Light, purely because it does contain the original game, which makes it a very worthwhile purchase for those new to the world of Disciples II. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for those who already own the game. Personally, I feel that both of the Disciples II expansions could have been rolled into one and the resulting mass released as a Gold or Deluxe version, because the core game is so similar between the original and the two packs.

This doesn’t circumvent the fact that Disciples II was a great game a year ago and still holds up well against other turn-based strategy games, so certainly try out one of the expansion packs, depending on whether you think you’ll prefer playing as good or evil, but if you have the original there is little incentive to pay for the same game three times over just for a few extra maps.