Swords & Soldiers II, thoughts on a genre and a reveal trailer

When I heard that a game called Swords & Soldiers II was heading to the Wii U eShop, it meant virtually nothing to me. The game's predecessor, a WiiWare title called Swords & Soldiers (fancy that), is a real-time strategy game with a big personality. You know, lots of humor and the like.

As generally occurs with a curious gamer like myself, I did a little research into this obscure series, especially after watching this new trailer for S&S II:

As I mentioned above, the two games are of the real-time strategy genre, played in 2D sidescrolling fashion. The only context I have for understanding real-time strategy games comes from sinking hours upon hours into Warcraft II when I was younger and Age of Mythology when I was older. The concept in those games is that the player is in control of entire civilizations, typically on a mission to build up expansive bases of operations, followed by well-rounded armies, which then must be directed to battle and defeat enemies for whatever reason. This all takes place from an overhead perspective.

I get 2D sidescrolling, and I get real-time strategy (at least partly), but getting the two ideas to coexist in my mind is fairly difficult, especially given my unidirectional history with real-time strategy games. But get this: Swords & Soldiers was ported to the Nintendo 3DS eShop, among others, making it really easy to get a hold of in more than one way.

Swords & Soldiers II doesn't have a solid release date yet, not even a timeframe really (2014 probably), but I intend to give the mix of real-time strategy and 2D sidescrolling a shot with its forbear. Full review to come!