Stick with the first one, this one has improved on some aspects of the game and took a step back in others.
GRAPHICS: 8.5
For the type of game this is and where they were going in terms of how realistic they seemed to be going for I believe they did a rather good job. I also liked the fact that not only did good chunks of the buildings fall off as they were attacked, but as your heros bought themselves new armor it changed the way they looked in game also.
The score was brought down partly because some of the characters just were not well designed. The mage didn't look much like your common video game mage for instance and although I like how games will try to go against a sterotype and try something new, I don't think some of the new looks really worked well.
CONTROLS: 9.5
Very easy to get the hang of, with only a couple important keys to remember to get into the main building menu. Not much to this game in terms of needing to remember button combos to build certain buildings as fast as possible like you would in a common RTS.
GAMEPLAY: 6.0
Unfortunately this is where the game suffers the most, I general don't like to mention the first game of a sequel in my reviews but the first game was quite a bit better in terms of gameplay. I often times couldn't build buildings in this game in areas with no logical reasoning why, unlike the first one where it was very clear why you couldn't. The trading posts that you build which are your main source of income can only be built in certain spots, where in the original they could be build wherever.
And this game makes turtling almost a necessity, some of the costs to upgrade things are so much you have no choice but to sit and wait and just spend a little bit of money to keep everything going while saving up a large sum of money to get some major upgrade. And you are constantly under attack at the very least by the skeletons from a graveyard that spawns after 1 or more heroes die or the sewers that pour out rats that spawn as your city grows. I unfortunately found it very hard to quickly advance my kingdom in the levels while keeping myself protected mostly due to the high costs of upgrades.
SOUND: 4.0
Certainly not horrible, but definitely below average. The constant sound of metal clanking gets rather old since you have to turtle so much throughout the game. And when your royal advisor talks to you before the mission he tries to sound humorous and make bad jokes as he tells you in 4 paragraphs something that he could tell you in one about what this mission is about.
STORY: 5.5
Not much of a story here but it doesn't really need one either. It does seem to have a little bit of an ongoing arc between certain missions but nothing very noticable.
MULTIPLAYER: N/A
There is the multiplayer option however I was never interested in trying it out which is why I but it down as N/A. But it does indeed have some multiplayer to it.
FINAL: 6.7