Despite a name that makes it sound like a pilot episode to an unsuccessful Seventies sci-fi show, Spellforce was a highly successful blend of hack and slash Diablo-inspired role playing mixed with army building Warcraft-style strategy. It wasn't a wholly successful venture, but given the complexity of splicing together two very separate and complex types of games, it was still a remarkably solid effort.

Having listened to criticism and taken on board advice from fans of the original, Spellforce 2: Shadow Wars addresses most of the shortcomings of the previous game without changing itself too drastically. The basic premise remains the same; guide a merry band of adventurers through traditional fantasty themed lands completing quests and collecting loot on the way, occasionally taking a break in between bouts of individual heroism to build towns and armies to fight an increasingly hostile enemy force.

There's been a shift in this outing towards the RPG side of the game, focusing more on your personilised hero character and his or her companions. You still create your own hero, with some fairly stripped down customisation options, choosing between two basic types of skills, those linked with combat and those to do with magic. For this adventure you and your two siblings must race to kingdoms far and wide, rallying armies to prepare for the coming war against the pointy-eared Dark Elves, helped occasionally along the way by other gallant hero types.

While the RTS sections of the game still remain, they are further and fewer between, making way for uninterrupted adventuring. There are dozens of quests per level, typically most are optional and never quite stray from the usual 'Collect X amount of this' or 'Kill Y amount of that' but each provides useful sources of experience for your characters, as well as rewards needed for tougher bouts against the game's increasingly nasty creatures. Occasionally there are quests that dig a little deeper; one may involve tracking potential cultists while another could involve number puzzles. They're still fairly simple as to what most RPG games offer, but they do break up the monotonous grind faced with many of the other quests quite well.

There's never any shortage of things to do, but the game does allow you to catch your breath every once in a while to admire its beautifully rendered world. The environments you adventure through are a varied collection of lush green forests, icy snowscapes and giant towering cities, it never fails to impress with its luscious looking greenery and shiny armour. You'll only ever get to appreciate the detail that's gone into the game when you zoom in for a closer inspection though, seeing cities and towns bustle with life as townsfolk go about their business or marvel at the light reflecting off the surface of the water. It's just a shame that you so often have to leave these lands bloodied with the remains of your many enemies.

With as equally a varied list of creatures to slay as the environments within which you slay them, the general hacking and slashing still plays a big part of the game. But again when those forces of evil prove to be too much for your small band of heroes, you're forced to build up armies to counter. The RTS sections now boast some substantial improvements. A newer, user friendly interface now makes it easier to issue commands and queue up units without the need to traipse all they way back to your base to select the options manually, while the ability to assign a workforce to a specific resource does away with all the needless micro-management that so often blights strategy games.

The selection of units at your disposal is never as varied or as interesting as countless other fantasy based RTS games and their usefulness alone without the company of your superior characters in tow is considerably less than when they are with a hero, but these sections play out at just the right time, spacing the long arduous questing you'll be doing most of the game and preventing the whole experience from becoming too repetitive.

The only real disappointment in all of this is the game's linearity, always with a forced path leading to your final destination. It's a small grievance however, as each level is so huge in scale that being linear often feels like a benefit more than a constraint, although newly placed waypoints which can teleport your characters around each map finally do away with any needless backtracking and make the journeys through each land a considerably less of a pain.

Once you've tired of the single player campaign, and given the enormous scale it's not something you will get bored of in a hurry, there's the multiplayer. Skirmish options are given, but Spellforce 2 goes one better by providing a Co-Op mode. Here you obtain quests from a Quest map with your avatar before going out and selecting a co-op game, playing one of the numerous level specific maps. Completing quests levels up your character as it would in the single player game, while loot and cash rewards allow you to buy new weapons and armour. It's a well-designed mode of play and with co-op games few and far between on the PC, it's one that's more than welcome.

If there is one major downfall for Spellforce 2, it's that the developers seemed to have ignored the first game's most troublesome flaw: the voice acting. It hasn't improved at all; you've still got the same collection of poorly accented voice actors who immediately put you off the otherwise gripping story. The soundtrack at least boasts some considerable improvements, with an orchestral score that wouldn't sound out of place in a big budget Hollywood movie.

Spellforce 2: Shadow Wars is an altogether well produced and highly entertaining package. Hybrids of game genres never quite seem to strike it right, but Spellforce 2 is one of those rare exceptions; fixing most of the problems suffered by the original, both its RPG and RTS elements are now considerably more enjoyable and the graphical presentation finally makes the game a serious contender amongst some stiff competition.

Reviewed by Kieron Giacopazzi for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).