Myth II (thing)

Description: Myth II: Soulblighter was little more than a refinement and continuation of Myth: The Fallen Lords, but when you start with a game as good as Myth, you can't really go wrong. Myth II detailed the next chapter in the war against the Fallen Lords; though their leader Balor had been soundly defeated in the first game, his first lieutenant Soulblighter has vowed to pick up where he left off.

Myth II used an engine that combined true 3D landscape generation and 3D models with 2D sprites for the units themselves. While the effect may not look terribly convincing at first, you forget that once combat begins. The interface is minimal, yet functional; for the most part, you'll play the game by band-selecting units, hitting a formation key on the keyboard and clicking on where you want them to go (or what you want them to attack). The on-screen interface is kept to a minimum. Support for more video cards (including general OpenGL support) made it possible to run the game accelerated on a far larger number of cards than Myth.

Notables: Myth II, like its predecessor, is known for two things: being damn hard and being horribly violent. The game really does require the player to master squad-based tactics on a progressive scale in order to finally beat it; fortunately it's not quite as hard as the first game was. And the violence is a graphic (and spectacular) punishment for when things go wrong or reward for when they go right. Blood flies and stains the ground, body parts fly everywhere, people get hacked to bits, things explode and leave craters. You can even pick up body parts, and there are actual reasons to do so in this game.

Myth II also unfortunately became known for a bug in the version of InstallShield that it used. If you installed the game to someplace other than the default directory, when you went to uninstall it the uninstaller would delete every file on your hard drive. This was technically a bug in InstallShield (which was not written by Bungie) but few players made the distinction. Even Penny Arcade poked fun. Fortunately it got fixed pretty quickly.

Myth II is also notable for providing an incredible number of ways to play this game multiplayer, including Assassin, Stampede, Steal the Bacon, Hunting, King of the Hill, Last Man on the Hill, Capture the Flag, Flag Rally, Territories, Balls on Parade, and last (and probably least), Deathmatch. The games are well-thought out and present interesting and diverse challenges to the players.

My Opinion: If you like your games good and hard, this one is it. It's a worthy successor to Myth: The Fallen Lords and an excellent game in its own right.

Notes:: This game developed simultaneously on the PC and the Macintosh, and was released simultaneously for both platforms. Developing for both platforms at the same time forced them to create very clean and abstracted code. This contributed greatly to the stability of the game; Myth II is as close to bulletproof as games tend to get. Multiplayer support is provided free of charge through Bungie.Net.

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