Myth II: Soulblighter takes every piece of Myth: The Fallen Lords and expands upon it, creating an epic carnage-fuelled real-time tactics game. Get it running with the Project Magma patch and bask in those modern resolutions.

Content wise, Soulblighter adds an absolute plethora of units, curious level gimmicks, a handful of quality of life improvements and a graphics upgrade all in a solid twenty-four level campaign. It's a general step up in difficulty from the first game, but notably feels a lot more fair, thanks to your more accurate ranged units, more special abilities to make use of, and general improvements to pathfinding.

Of course, Myth's signature gore and carnage remains, so blowing up a huge wave of enemies feels distinctively gratifying with ash and bone spread amongst the battlefield. That action is definitely the foreground to the story, which definitely felt pretty dang great (and for those in the rabbit hole, yes, there's lots to look at there).

Still, there's some pain points. Sometimes it feels like when I give orders to my units they don't quite listen, pathfinding is still pretty rough, and some levels felt a bit more gruelling than what might've been intended. Also like, the magic item in the second-last mission kinda came out of nowhere? Would've been cool to have a mission to recover it.

8/10 - I will wait nine-hundred and forty years for my units to line up right.

FYI: This review covers both Myth: The Fallen Lords and Myth II: Soulblighter since the best way actually to play the original is through The Fallen Levels mod for Soulblighter. It’s a godsend for those who want to skip all the usual hurdles of playing a 25-year-old game. Get your hands on Myth II (it’s 2023, I’m sure you’ll manage somehow), patch it up for modern computers with the excellent Project Magma patch, and install the Fallen Levels; a perfect recreation of the first game’s campaign, complete with cutscenes and mission briefings, made through Soulblighter’s map maker.

Aaaaanywaaaaay. Myth is amazing. Or as my friends used to call it; “Myst? Yeah, I’ve played it. Really boring though. Oh, MYTH. Hmm. Nope, never heard of it.” If Marathon is (or until recently; was) obscure, Myth seems virtually unknown. Like Marathon, probably because it was a bigger deal on Mac than Windows PC.

Basically, Myth plays like an RTS game for people who don't like RTS games. It’s been described as a Real-Time Tactical game instead, which I guess sums up the gameplay pretty well. I'm sure Myth didn't invent the genre or anything, but at least I hadn't played anything quite like it upon its release. Myth opts out of resource harvesting and base construction, and instead puts focus on troop formation and management. It drops you a predetermined number of units at the start of every mission and leaves you to your own devices.

This makes every mission feel fresh and unique. Even though the objectives aren’t all that varied - you’ll run across maybe 3-4 mission types - the predetermined troop deployment forces you to rethink your tactics and approach to match your team.

Physics, terrain, elevation, and weather bring a certain element of unpredictability to the game, which in turn underscores the importance of troop placement. Like, chucking a Molotov at a group of monsters engaged with your infantry is a really bad idea, since it will turn everything in its blast zone to red mush.

It also requires a lot of on-the-spot thinking and rearrangement of units, depending on what kind of threat turns up around the next bend. Slow-mowing thralls are easily picked apart by your bomb dwarfs and mopped up by broadsword-wielding berserkers. Lightning bolt-shooting Fetch-sorcerors, on the other hand, are better left for your archers to tag before they get too close and turn your team into smoldering charcoal.

So, a steep learning curve with at least three "oops"-moments is an obligatory rite of passage for any desktop commander (okay, maybe five). But man is it fun when you get the hang of it. Or when corralling a large group of enemies into a bottleneck, just to set off a bomb trap and listen to the chunky sound effects of blood and guts raining down.

But the ace up Myth's sleeve is its presentation. Sure, it looks like a semi-3D game from 1997 because, well, it is. I don't particularly mind as I find the graphics charming, and Project Magma-patch goes a long way to spruce up textures and beef up the resolution. [SIDENOTE: I remember booting up Myth III, not developed by Bungie and in full early-aughts 3D, for the first time a distinctly feeling "thanks. I hate it"].

The sound design is great, the music even better (if you've ever dudududu'ed while escaping with Master Chief from an exploding space station, you have Myth to thank as it was Martin O'Donell's first Bungie game) and the mission briefings are excellent. No, really. This comes up a lot when talking about Myth, and how Bungie both manages to flesh out the world through them and make you invested in its ultimate fate. The grizzled narrator reading excerpts from a warrior's diary really sells what would be a pretty standard high-fantasy story in less capable hands. Grim-dark might be overstating it, but certainly bleak with just the right amount of self-seriousness. It’s sets the tone perfectly.

I wish I had the time to play through Myth more often. Now it’s more like once every 5-6 years. But every time I remember why I keep coming back to a game that most of the world has moved past. Here’s hoping that the next time Bungie has a big announcement it’s Myth-related. And not some god-awful PvP games-as-a-service shooter.

Myth is a unique series in the annals of the strategy genre. The factors that make it unique limit its appeal to what I imagine to be the typical RTS fan, but they have also granted it an enduring cult status in the eyes of the few (enough, at least, to secure updates to modern systems in the form of Project Magma, though not enough to save it from the abandonware limbo). They superficially resemble RTS games that were popular at the time, but any base building or unit construction has been stripped away. There are no resources to manage other than your units, which number in the low tens at most, and there is no opportunity to replenish them during a mission (outside of scripted reinforcements, which are rare). It goes without saying that each unit is therefore very, very precious. Myth also boasts of an innovative engine that treats each projectile as a separate physics object, subject to gravity and weather effects. All of these factors together place overall gameplay emphasis squarely on battlefield tactics: formations, positioning (to take advantage of terrain as well as avoid friendly fire), and various kinds of tactical maneuvers. The number of unit types is not large, but there is no redundancy, and nothing really missing aside from a scout-type unit which could add a thin layer of strategic depth.

In typical Bungie fashion, there is a lot of effort put into story presentation in the campaign. Granted, it is typical dark fantasy shlock. For, uh, mythical reasons, an army of undead is on the march, set to annihilate the human race. Hope is, naturally, all but lost. Thankfully, the actual missions sell this scenario as much as the impressive narration and drawings that introduce them. The campaign is notoriously hard, confronting the player with overwhelming amounts of undead resistance from an early stage. Early missions have a good variety of objectives, and the player is well-advised to choose their battles wisely in completing them. As the campaign drags on, however, more and more missions force the player to hold a position while fighting off wave after wave of opposition, or march from point A to point B while killing everything in between. These become extremely punishing, with the last mission in particular being a brutal slog where all but the most minor mistakes force a reload. Mission briefings are more about storytelling than anything else, so success becomes a matter of memorizing opposition forces rather than any kind of strategic planning. The game's tutorial basically tells you to savescum, so there's that.

Soulblighter is a strict upgrade over The Fallen Lords, but the games share technical flaws like shoddy pathfinding (Soulblighter's is way better but still) and a camera that is too close to the ground (which also tends to limit the terrain depth promised by the game's physics). Soulblighter's map design is much better as a whole, but should you for some reason want to play The Fallen Lords' campaign it's been ported to Soulblighter as a mod.

As a single-player experience Myth has a lot going for it: a strong theme and unique playstyle that is accessible to non-strategy fans, but challenging enough to take some dedication to get through. It's certainly not deep, but there's a reason I've kept knocking my head against it over the years. Multiplayer Myth looks like bloody chaos in the best way possible, but unfortunately I have been unable to get any of my friends to be interested in the game. Miraculously there are still servers running for online play, so maybe I'll hop onto one of those at some point.