Since the time of its release, Myth has kept up as one of the most advanced and innovative real-time strategy games on the market, wielding some of the most impressive graphical effects that the strategy genre has ever seen. Now, about a year later, Bungie has returned with Myth II: Soulblighter, a game that is both one of the best sequels to hit the scene and one of the finest titles on the RTS market. This, my fellow gamers, is what sequels are all about.

Myth II does an excellent job of varying all 25 of the missions and their settings. There is a huge variety of backdrops, from the open daytime of a castle to the stormy bow of a ship to the dark depths of a haunted dungeon. Like the original, environment has a huge effect on the game. E.g. rain and snow will extinguish a dwarf's explosives, and upper ground gives a huge advantage over those below. In the end, Myth II offers some of the most creative and immersive environments in the industry.

Bungie made a few important adjustments when designing the control system in the sequel, but kept the overall idea the same. As a result, fans of the original Myth should feel extremely at ease with the controls in Myth II. While the keyboard can still be used to move, rotate and zoom the camera, players can now perform these tasks using only the mouse as well. A helpful control bar at the bottom provides easy access to "commonly used features," the most important being troop formations. Movement orders can now be given at both the overhead map and the main battlefield. And lastly, the two most important changes since the original are the use of the keyboard arrows to rotate characters and the availability of clear mission objectives at any time during a mission.

You can easily get carried with this game as most like it, you think you’ve been on it 5mins and you look at the clock and its been an hour or more.

Bungie made a few tweaks to the game's awesome 3D engine. There are more polygons and more frames of animation, an impressive feat given the low minimum system requirements. The excellent landscape design, smooth and detailed texture maps and sweet terrain effects are all still there, but with greater variation. The terrain has many more highs and lows, meaning deeper canyons and higher plateaus. In addition, improved water, shadow, and particle-based fire effects all help lead to the overall sense of awe that you experience when playing the game.

Rivals: Populous

Star Rating: HIIII

Producer: Bungie

PC Requirements:

Windows 95/98/NT 4.0

Pentium 133Mhz

32 MB RAM

SVGA Video card 3D card recommended

4X CD-ROM