I finally finished Warlords Battlecry II last week [?] and it was a pretty excellent game, but with a few flaws. It was very deep with a lot of spells to learn, different creatures to kill and races and professions to chose from. There were also a lot of different scenarios with assorted winning conditions to keep it interesting. The hero system with all the upgrades you get to use was a lot of fun. The chance to build Titans was also very cool. When your titan finally appeared, you knew you were ready to kick ass! I played as the humans throughout the game, so my titan was the Sirian, a slow-moving giant, but packing a big-ass fiery sword. It's a real-time strategy game but you can set the speed and set orders during pause. I accepted the enemy's offer to cede victory to me after 48 wins as I was getting a little tired of the game and I wanted to move on.

As to flaws, there were a few. There wasn't much of a story. While a story isn't absolutely necessary, it would have enhanced gameplay. The graphics were rather mediocre. Units would converge into one big blob during battles. It was also a very dark game, graphically, even when the gamma was set to its highest setting. To make matters worse, there was a 'night' spell enemy heroes could use that would make everything even darker. Very frustrating, luckily my hero had a spell to turn the 'sun' back on. In one scenario, the enemy hero kept turning it into night and I would use my spell to turn it back into day, but then he would immediately turn it back into night! Very irritating, I hated that one.

The worst problem, for me, was the single-game save system, ala Diablo. Many times I would save thinking I was doing good, only to have a huge enemy army come along and slaughter me, right after I had saved the game, screwing up my only save-game, forcing me to start the scenario from scratch again. Not to mention times when a unit would end up 'stuck' on a rock or something, rendering it useless for the rest of the game. This only seemed to happen when reloading saved games.

Another problem was the cannon-fodder nature of the gameplay. Trying to build up units in your retinue from scenario to scenario was pretty well useless. To do this, you had to babysit your retinue units to make sure they didn't die. I gave up after awhile as it wasn't worth the effort. Too bad.

Overall tho, this was a great game and I'd highly recommend it despite its flaws. Of the few games I played this year, I would put them in this order:

1. Rise of Nations - great game, very polished, same old RTS gameplay but very well done and fun
   
2. Warlords Battlecry II - great game marred by a few flaws
   
3. Kohan - mediocre game, highly overrated, the balancing of resource collection against army size was an interesting twist on the old RTS gameplay, but it was still an average game, very simple
   
4. Warcraft III - worst game I've played in a long time, a total waste of time, I played it to the last scenario when it bogged down on my old computer, never bothered to finish it on my new computer, absolutely putrid
   

Well, that's what I played, and completed [except WCIII], in 2003. I know, not much, it's hard to find the time to play lately.