Etherlords II due in March

Deep Silver has signed the rights to publish Etherlords II in Europe. Developed by Nival Interactive, Etherlords II is a mixture of role-playing, strategy and turn-based magical combat ala trading card games, and should be released on March 5th.

What you get for your money is a single-player mode where the story is revealed to the player by RPG-style chats with worldly inhabitants, and quest completion seen from each of the game's four main racial perspectives. A bit like an RTS, you'll also collect resources to fuel exploration, and to purchase more exotic summoning creatures and spells, and five campaigns should just about cover all the bases, including the occasional cross-race magic and monsters.

Since it's a trading card game, it's hardly surprising to see multiplayer high on the list of requirements, and anybody with an eye for this sort of thing will appreciate the dedicated servers, auto-rating tournament system and anti-cheat defences backing up a mixture of one-on-one deathmatch duels and elimination-style matches for eight simultaneous players.

Etherlords II may not immediately appeal to shallow egotists like us, but it has a strong reputation and scored quite respectably following its recent release in the US via DreamCatcher.