Wrath Unleashed Impressions

On our visit to the LucasArts' E3 booth this afternoon we caught our first glimpse of the recently announced Wrath Unleashed for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox. The game features an intriguing combination of strategy and one-on-one fighting gameplay and will support up to four players--each playing as earth, air, water, or fire.

At the start of a game each of you will be given a fixed number of points to spend on amassing your army--choosing from a wide selection of mythical creatures bearing the rank of pawn, lieutenant, or general according to their strength and corresponding cost. The strategy portion of the game will consist of a hex-based map on which there are a number of temples to capture, which is achieved by moving one of your units to the temple tile in much the same way you'd move a chess piece. Of course your opponents will be trying to do exactly the same thing, and when one of your units gets too close to an enemy, the game's combat mode will come into play.

The combat portion of the game will essentially be a free-roaming fighter set in relatively small environments. The characters in this portion of the game looked solid and came in more different shapes and sizes than the entire casts of the Street Fighter and Tekken series' put together. The battles during our demo were occasionally horribly mismatched as pawn units bravely squared up to creatures much more powerful than them, but since any damage sustained in the fights will be carried over for the duration of the game, you might occasionally want to sacrifice a character or two deliberately so that you can weaken more powerful enemies before going in for the kill with one of your own. Another way that you might gain an advantage in a fight, which we didn't actually get to see, is through the levels themselves--which in some cases will have their own elemental alignment. If you were fighting with a fire-based unit, for example, and fighting in a fire-themed level, you wouldn’t sustain any damage if you were to fall into a lava pit--although your enemy most definitely would.

Wrath Unleashed is currently scheduled for release toward the end of this year. We'll bring you more information on the game as soon as it becomes available.