The game follows the struggles of a group of four different clans, once part of a single group and now shattered by a cataclysmic sacrifice meant to stave off an advancing horde of shadowy demons. Each group has retreated to their own corner of the world and concentrated on their own pursuits, such as the restoration of order, the retreat into nature or the pursuit of the blackest kind of magic. The player arrives on-scene as the last survivor of the Dragon Clan, determined to either bring peace and justice back to the land, or crush it beneath his boot heel.

If this sounds kind of cheesy, well, it is. But it’s cheesy in an infectious way, and Battle Realms manages to follow through with its exaggerated drama in just about every facet of itself. Even the smallest details of the game are bright, colourful and extreme, and they show exactly the kind of attention paid to the kind of entertaining gameplay that it manages to produce.

The game is played through a very easily recognizable interface, one that seems very much reminiscent of every other real-time strategy title out there. Peasants gather resources and build different structures in order to produce various units, and those combat units go forth to lay waste to opposing clans’ units and buildings. But almost immediately, Battle Realms manages to change the rules. Peasants are issued automatically from village huts, at intervals that decrease in direct proportion to the number of units already on the screen, and rather than being sent off to gather gold or wood, they simply gather rice and water. And, to make things more efficient, others can be assigned to continually water the fields from which rice springs, functionally making both resources inexhaustible.

Most interestingly, though, peasants are also the only new units produced by your village. Want spearmen? Build a dojo and use it to train your villagers. Want mounted soldiers? Get some peasants to tame wild horses, and send your trained soldiers over to claim their new steeds. Unlike Age of Empires or Starcraft, soldiers and weapons don’t just spontaneously emerge from the hidden confines of training facilities or factories — instead, generating an army comes at the cost of the population of the overall village, elevating them from disposable worker bees to the most critical resource in the game.

As a result, managing a base of operations in Battle Realms becomes more than simply a race up the technology tree. Instead, players are forced to carefully balance between their standing military force and the rest of their population, and pay careful attention to when that balance must shift in favor of one over the other. Fighting units become much more of an investment, and while it’s still possible to churn out a huge number of grunts to rush the enemy, Battle Realms economic system (thankfully) makes it a much more costly tactic than ever before.

Besides, there’s so much more fun to be had with units than simply pumping them out and sending them off to the slaughter. Battle Realms also includes its own system of unit alchemy, allowing players to send their villagers through very different training programs to produce a dazzling number of characters. Players can choose to train their peasants at one or many of the different facilities they construct, producing fighters as basic as an Archer, as versatile as a Geisha or as exotic as Powder Keg Cannoneer. And once they’re done with that, they can even choose to send individual advanced units through even more training, elevating them to an elite level and granting them additional powers, health and offensive bite. Plus, as victories and enemy corpses pile up, the player also amasses Yin/Yang points, which can be used to upgrade entire classes of units and increase the impact of various powers, like magical attacks or Zen abilities.

The latter belong to a special group of unique hero characters, Zen Masters, who are supplied to the player throughout the single-player campaign. The game starts with one, Kenji, but as the story progresses more characters flock under the player’s banner, each with their own special abilities, and all of whom are made more powerful by an abundance of Yin or Yang points. Depending on the which path the player takes — that of the benevolent leader or the despotic tyrant — more of either Yin or Yang will accumulate, and the more potent the abilities of the Zen Masters will be.

The campaign itself is varied and fun, though it’s occasionally bogged down by single-objective missions that depend more on timing or luck than tactics or planning. Combat can occasionally grow a bit frenzied, and with the fanciful animations of each unit spinning and jumping at each other, it can be difficult to keep track of who’s attacking what with which. But the huge variety of battles possible with the vast and varied forces available make the game playable long after the initial campaign is completed, through the skirmish and multi-player modes available.

It’s worth noting, too, that it’s difficult to get tired of just looking at Battle Realms. The mission maps are beautiful and elegantly rendered in a smooth 3D engine, and are occasionally surprising in just how interactive they are. Rain will occasionally shower down, making unit movement slower, crops grow faster, and fires go out sooner; the fog of war is represented as an eerie mist that parts as your units pass through it, closing in behind them as they pass out of range. Enemies passing through the wrong part of the forest might upset a flock of birds, betraying their position as they attempt to sneak up on your happily toiling villagers.

The sound effects are slightly less impressive, though. Hand-to-hand combat is accompanied by the appropriate sounds of blades ringing and flesh crunching, and some of the more horrible units who appear later on have similarly appropriate awful noises to highlight their nastiness. But some of the simplest sounds get to be very grating, particularly the snapping noise of arrows as they strike their targets, as does the voice acting for a few of the (unfortunately) most common unit types.

But these are extremely minor gripes about a game that is surprisingly good, and whose intricacy seems to have a way of turning fifteen-minute time-killing games into a two-hour battle royales. Through a few very interesting tweaks in what’s quickly becoming a tired genre, and by then soaking the resulting game in style and visual detail, Liquid Entertainment has managed to turn More Of The Same into something new, entertaining, and well worth picking up.