Coming later this month for the Xbox and PlayStation 2 is LucasArts' unusual strategy/action hybrid, Wrath Unleashed. Wrath Unleashed is a board-game-like strategy game, played a little like chess on a hex-map battlefield. Instead of just taking pieces, when two units move close to each other, Wrath cuts to a real-time battle fought between the two, one-on-one.

Sound familiar? Wrath Unlimited is in many ways a remake of the 1983 Commodore 64 classic, Archon. Like Archon, Wrath pits armies of dragons, djinni, giants, and so on against each other from opposite sides of a game board. And, like Archon, the battlefield in Wrath has objective squares (known in Wrath as "mana temples"), squares both players are battling to control. The similarities don't stop there. Each army in Wrath is lead by a god, like the wizard and sorceress from Archon, and that god can cast spells to support the army, be it by changing the terrain or simply blasting a character with hellfire.

Of course, it has been 20 years. Wrath offers more options and less abstraction. Each player picks an element: fire, water, earth, or air, and these elements correspond to the terrain in each hex. Additionally, the player chooses a demigod or god to lead his/her army, and the choice of leader will determine the available spells. Armies are also purchased at the beginning of each battle, and different units cost different amounts of points.

The combat, when units engage each other, is vaguely reminiscent of War of the Monsters. Each monster has a strong and weak melee attack, strong and weak ranged attack, super-attack, and block. There seems to be some strategy to canceling ranged attacks with ranged attacks, and different units specialize in different forms of attack.

Archon was pretty for its time, but Wrath Unleashed looks simply fantastic. It doesn't look quite as smooth as some recent titles, though it makes up for this in imagination. The battlefield designs take fairly boring themes (fire stage, ice stage, etc.) and make them visually interesting, and the different monsters are creatively re-imagined for each element. The water unicorn looks like a narwhal, the water dragon looks like a sea serpent, and so on.

All in all, Wrath Unleashed is an interesting combination of strategy and action, with style and uniqueness to spare. It has a great deal of potential, and if it delivers, it may be another feather in LucasArts cap, and might even be a sign that LucasArts could become a strategy game publisher to watch. Who said that all they can make is Star Wars games?

Upcoming LucasArts release dates:
Wrath Unleashed - February 10th
Star Wars Battlefront - September 29th (very far away, indeed)
Star Wars Republic Commando - TBA