It is a shame that this game didn't come in a promotional box with a bottle of ether. It's the sort of thing you would like to see in this world, but unfortunately such a boon would contravene a few laws and may cause a trip to the hospital. Which, contrary to the maxim, would not be good publicity. But if Etherlords 2 had come with a sample of Raoul's favoured sinus-clearer this reviewer would have seen the game in far more favourable lights. I would have probably been able to play it without any major difficulties as well as Etherlords 2 is a fairly basic adventure slash RPG-lite slash turn-based combat game.

The game is set in the World of the Lords, a realm dominated by Ether, the substance from which all things are created. There are six different kinds of ether, each with individual names like the Red Ether of Chaos and the Black Ether of Synthesis, which are in effect the game's six races. Each race is defined by the form of its parent Ether, so the Chaots are all about fire and destruction, where as the Synthets are all about merging man and machine. It's all rather silly and encourages a mental 'la-la-la-not-listening' whenever characters in the campaign start drivelling on about it. That last bit also may have a lot to do with the voice acting, but we'll get to that in just a tic.

The voice acting in the campaign game is predictably dire. The voice talent appears to have been sourced from a small office somewhere in Northern Ireland which has one eastern European working there, and possibly someone from Orkney. It's shoddy and amateur, but even with it switched-off the stories that make up the five campaigns get rammed down your throat by every NPC that you meet on your procession. And it's all naff, which only served to put me off the campaign side of the game. The adventuring screen is similar to a host of older Japanese console games like Marioworld and Zelda. You start off at the edge of a map and wander about taking quests from NPCs dotted about the place. These NPCs will warble in some terrible accents the terrible words displayed in their speech bubbles, eventually setting you off in the direction of someone that needs spoken to, or failing that, needs a good twatting. You can also come across special sites where you may be able to purchase some spells using the resources you can collect or will find a powerful object to aid in your quest. You get to go up levels during your adventures. Each time you go up a level your character will get more health, learn one of a number of various special abilities and get to pick up to five permanent attribute enhancements. And the way you go up in levels is to gain experience from - you knew it - twatting enemies. Every time you encounter a foe you are given the choice of whether or not to engage them, a decision you may prefer to if you see that their level is higher then your own.

The combat is the meat and veg of the game, with the bits acting as the plate. And as you may have figured out I don't rate this very much as a serving dish. Casting aside the story and the lamentable sounds coming from the speakers (the and sound effects aren't much better than the voices), the actual gameplay here is better suited to a GameBoy. Unfortunately it has less depth than many similarly themed GB titles, and is something that I quickly tired of. I did get some enjoyment from levelling up and getting new stuff, but that is the result of what must now be recognised as a genetic trait in human beings. A paper should be written on this phenomenon - the Ascent of Levels or something - a phenomenon which has been exploited by developers for over twenty years but is still unknown to science. What else can it be but something hard coded into our DNA that makes people continue to play Everquest and 2 after all these years? Anyway, I have digressed, my mind has wandered. A similar thing happened regularly while I ploughed through the campaigns, and it would have wandered off and forgotten all about the game - and this review, if the combat side of things hadn't been so different.

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