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Etherlords, an iconic strategy created by Nival, became a bestseller in the world and earned highest grades from critics. Etherlords is an exciting mix of turn-based strategy and fantasy trading card game. Innovative game mechanics that first appeared in this game formed the basics of most modern games of this genre. Etherlords Anthology includes the original Etherlords and Etherlords 2. Five campaigns are filled with non-linear missions, boats, tunnels, transports,.

Heroes Of The Gathering It's a kind of MagicTake one copy of Heroes of Might & Magic. Mix in two decks ofMagic: The Gathering. Garnish with an impressive 3D graphicsengine, add a liberal sprinkling of eye candy, toss in a bag fullof freakish looking monsters and then simmer for eighteen months.Et voila, Etherlords.On paper it sounds like a great concept, combining the addictiveturn-based strategic gameplay of the Heroes games with the equallyaddictive card-based tactical battles of Magic. As usual in thiskind of game you begin each mission with one or more herocharacters which you guide around a map of the world dotted withresources, buildings and monsters. Some of these buildings willprovide you with resources each turn, while others boost theabilities of your hero, or allow you to spend your resources onbuying more powerful spells for them to use. These spells come intoplay when you attack a monster or enemy hero. Rather than taking anarmy of creatures around with you, as you would in Heroes or Age ofWonders, in Etherlords you summon new creatures for each battleusing the deck of spell cards you have amassed.Each of the game's four unique races has its own set of cards,which sadly can't be mixed.

Some of these conjure up bizarrelooking monsters, from your run of the mill kobolds and giant ratsto ornate mechanical lifeforms and insect-like mantids, whileothers can be used to enhance the abilities of the creaturesalready under your control or to weaken the enemy. The wide rangeof cards included in the game gives you plenty of scope forcreating your own fifteen card decks, especially once you take intoaccount the fact that some creatures will boost the abilities ofsimilar monsters under your command. It's all very bewildering atfirst sight, and you may want to indulge in a few practice duels tolearn the ropes before you dive into the game's main campaign.Hard, Harder, Impossible It's a bit tricky!And this is where things start to break down.

Put simply, thecampaign missions are far too hard, and from about the thirdmission onwards most people will be struggling to stay alive, letalone to win. However quickly you move your heroes around theworld, the enemy always seems to have the upper hand when itfinally emerges from the fog of war.This problem is made worse by the fact that the difficulty settingssimply don't work.

Whichever of the five levels you choose to playon, the enemy will always behave in exactly the same way andusually end up with a hero which has more experience and betterspells than your own, making them very tough to defeat. Jurassic runner download torrent. All you cando is focus on developing one hero as rapidly as possible and hopeyou can keep up. If you succeed you kill the enemy's lead hero andthe rest of the mission is mopping up.

If you fail the enemyslaughters your lead hero and all you can do is quit and startagain from an old save game.In fact, the only thing which your choice of difficulty settingactually changes is how tough your encounters with neutral monstersare, which is helpful in the early stages of a mission but notreally enough to make the campaigns playable for less experiencedgamers. And to make matters worse, you can't even carry your heroesfrom one mission to the next as you would in Heroes of Might &Magic - every time you have to start out from scratch, whichquickly becomes irritating as you fight the same low level monsterswith the same low level spells, desperately trying to gainexperience faster than your opponent.Abbynormal Run away!Conversely, the stand-alone missions are far too easy on anydifficulty setting, thanks to the weakness of the AI. Missionsrevolve around castles; destroy an enemy castle and their factionis removed from play, lose your own and it's game over.

Which wouldbe fine, except that your opponent is utterly incapable of eitherdefending his own castle or attacking yours. Often they ignore yourheroes entirely and carry on hoovering up resources or attackingneutral monsters as if you weren't there at all, which makes mostof the single missions a walkover.Your enemy also seems to be remarkably reluctant to use any of theshops scattered around the map to buy new spells for his heroes inthe stand-alone missions, which makes them very easy to defeat onceyou've built up your own deck, even if they have managed toout-level you. The AI doesn't have this problem in campaignmissions (quite the opposite in fact - enemy heroes build uppowerful decks frighteningly early on), so either the game is justplain broken or the AI cheats in the campaigns and uses the fog ofwar to disguise this. Either way, it's not very impressive.The card-based combat system has other problems as well. You begineach battle with six cards drawn at random from your deck offifteen, and then get dealt one more card each turn. Unfortunatelythis means that bad luck can leave you with a totally useless handfor a few turns, and although you can minimise this risk by keepinga varied deck, sometimes things just don't work out and all you cando is hit 'surrender' and reload from the last autosave position.This is a particular problem for the Kinets, whose basic deck ishorribly under-powered compared to the other three races at thebest of times. Kinets have no direct attack spells and can't summonany creatures from their starting deck until the third turn.

Bywhich time your opponent probably already has a small army ofcreatures waiting to tear your hero limb from limb. They make upfor this later on in the game with some incredibly powerful highlevel spells, but you'll be lucky to get that far.Back And Forth Boy are you uglyEven more annoying is the fact that, apart from the basic spellsyou start out with, every card in your deck has a limited number ofcharges.

Once these are exhausted you can no longer cast thatspell, leaving you dashing back to the nearest 'portal' to buyfresh supplies after every few battles.You can't customise your deck before battles either - the only wayto change the cards you hold is to travel to the appropriatebuilding and buy some new ones. As the cards you want may be spreadbetween two or three shops scattered across half the map, thismakes changing your deck an incredibly time consuming business, andyou can't even swap spells between heroes to speed things up. As aresult the combat system is far less dynamic than it really shouldbe, and if you find yourself up against an enemy whose deckincludes cards which render yours useless, you're basicallystuffed.It's not all bad news though. Battles can be very enjoyable,and the wide range of cards and the interdependencies between thevarious spells gives them real tactical depth, while the swoopingcamera views and over-the-top special effects make them a joy tobehold. Until you switch off all the options to speed things up,anyway. It's just a pity that the missions don't allow you toproperly explore this side of the game, leaving it to duels (bothonline and against the AI) to show you what Etherlords couldhave been.ConclusionsWe had high hopes for Etherlords, but sadly most of the niggles wehad with the beta code we played six months ago still haven't beenfixed. The AI is a mess, the missions seriously unbalanced, thecard purchase system tedious and the learning curve almostvertical.

Throw in a dodgy script and some of the worst voiceacting ever to grace a computer game and you're left with apotential classic which falls far short of its potential.-5/10.