Kohan, since the first installment back in 2001, has had its roots in turn-based strategy. Under the premise that TBS games generally bored gamers to death, but that the concepts therein still held depth and true overarching strategy that the RTS genre had sorely lacked, Timegate borrowed what it could from that pipe-smoking bearded man genre. The Kohan series utilizes elements such as unit management at the company level rather than the individual level, no traditional micromanaged harvesting of resources, and battles decided more by unit composition and battlefield formations than number of cursor clicks.

Instead of riding on the moderate success of the original titles, however, Kohan 2 sees a return to many standard RTS conventions in an obvious attempt to draw the mainstream gamer to an otherwise niche product. The functional problem here is that Kohan 2 does not stand out as a conventional RTS game, nor does it retain the depth and elegance of Kohan: Ahriman’s Gift.

To start off on the specifics, the interface is a hulking mass of worthless excess. A full one-third of the screen is consumed by oversized profile images and buttons, with useful information behind multiple click-throughs and unnecessary tooltips. Whatever details are actually provided are squished off to the side, despite the large gaps of free space present on the interface bar. Poorly designed button graphics leave the interface further damned, eschewing the intuitive entirely and usually requiring some purposeful commission to memory.

Making matters all the worse, the middleware-driven graphics engine seems incapable of providing clearly distinguishing characteristics for the dozens of unit types. Potential for strategic depth is lost when much of your play time is spent hovering over friendly companies to find out exactly what they are. This aspect is especially pronounced during skirmishes, where both sides’ companies cast giant spherical protection spells that envelop the troops while they fight. The fight is more to keep track of what is actually happening than controlling the forces for the best possible outcome.

Unfortunately, the single player campaign doesn’t make up for these shortcomings. Greeted by cutscenes with impossibly stilted dialogue, plot elements leaving you craving for the storytelling expertise of your junior high pencil & paper dungeon master, and hardcore edge-of-your-seat missions that require as few as three clicks to complete entirely, few will struggle to the conclusion of this exercise in mediocrity. But hey, this is nothing new; the previous Kohan games sported boring single player campaigns as well, with the focus being on the fantastic multiplayer side.

Clearly, though, “fantastic” isn’t what I’d use to describe anything but the setting of Kohan 2. Still, the multiplayer options here are largely serviceable. The random map generator works its magic without breaking anything, and the faction/race combinations allow for some semblance of variety. The main problem with the factions, though, is that of the six races present, all have a different name for everything, despite the units serving the same function and usually costing the same in resources. An Engineer is a Forge is a Crafter, in every way but the name. It’s an artificial attempt at factional diversity, and the little contextual flavor it adds is offset by it adding yet another convolution to a game that has more than its fill already.

A minor quibble, maybe, but problems like these are endemic to Kohan 2. Call an Engineer an Engineer for all the races and you find few differences between them, usually centered on the two or three magic support units that can be mixed into the company creation process. While each faction and race combination yields minor differences to aspects like gold production or unit morale, it’s not enough to make up for the inadequacies elsewhere.

That said, battles end up consisting of early exploration, happening upon special tech buildings and avoiding nasty surprises, with priority given to finding the randomly placed settlement spots in order to expand territory (unlike the previous Kohan games, which took a limited “settle anywhere” approach). Again another problem, as matches can easily be decided by the map generator’s placement of these spots. Settlements are the primary generators of resources for units and further expansion, so having your scouts run in the wrong direction can cause precious minutes to be lost. Matches can be played on preset maps, but much of the desired strategy in Kohan lies with taking advantage of the map generator’s terrain placement on the fly, rather than simply memorizing the best spots in pre-made areas.

Kohan 2: Kings of War is not a terrible game. Casual real-time strategy gamers may garner some fun out of the different approach to the genre taken here, shared by its vastly superior predecessor Ahriman’s Gift. Hardcore fans may also be able to get some life out of the number-crunching that might be had after some thorough sifting of the manual’s specifics on unit statistics. Jeremy Soule’s soundtrack is pretty neat, too. These are superficial concessions, though; Kohan 2 fares poorly compared to other genre offerings, and I’d be hard-pressed to recommend it.