There are two methods of control: touch screen or buttons. The game is controlled almost entirely with the Wii U Gamepad. Unless you’re a veteran of the original series, be warned: getting all the medals in the game is HARD. The medals range from finishing the levels in a particular time to defeating a specified number of enemies by the close of the stage and so forth. The single player campaign will set you back about 7 to 10 hours more if you’re going for all the objective-based medals (of which each level has three). And the glory of the strategy is that for every unit the enemy throws at you, there’s at least one counter-unit that you can send its way–provided you have the money, of course. Your direct intervention comes into play when casting spells on the battlefield, and these range from simple healing spells for your own units to powerful meteors that bombard the enemy. There’s also the occasional building you have to create, but it’s not as central to the game as most top-down RTS games. The rest of the game is far more RTS and much of the strategy comes in the form of building units, upgrading units, and gathering resources in the forms of gold and mana. They obey the “go right until you run into something you can hit in the face” rule.

The TD influences show when you discover that you can’t directly control many of your units at all. Your army starts on one side, and the opponents on the other. It’s a sidescrolling, beautifully drawn and animated 2D strategy game. Gameplay itself hasn’t changed much from the original. The story itself is fun nonsense, and is just there to string the single-player missions together. This time, the foes have been switched with Persians and demons, allowing for new scope in puns and other sorts of humor. In the original game, the vikings were arrayed against armies of Aztecs and imperial Chinese. I grab my viking helmet (no horns), Persian cutlass, and go demon hunting to bring you this review. 6 years later, and we finally have the sequel, named the same except with the “II” appended to it to let us know it’s not the same game as the first. The game, released on WiiWare, was enough of a success that it prompted remakes on other consoles and even on smartphones. In 2009, Ronimo Games (the same people behind the amazing Awesomenauts) released Swords and Soldiers, ostensibly a real time strategy (RTS) game, but closer in fact to being a cross between RTS and tower defense (TD).

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