In Swords & Soldiers HD you have option to play as the Vikings, Aztecs and Chinese, making your way through them as you play in campaign mode, or you can select your preference for a skirmish.

The basic idea is that you create various units and send them off to do battle. Oddly enough it is very similar in concept and gameplay to Trenches: Generals which I recently reviewed.

The original Swords & Soldiers HD is free here for the next day.Chillingo have named their Swords and Soldiers HD app for iPad the funniest action-strategy game you will ever play. Swords & Soldiers 2: Shawarmageddon will be out on PC this autumn, priced at £16/$20. Hopefully the upcoming sequel finds the audience it deserves, as it's apparently a somewhat richer and more complex game than the first and a more confident design overall. Swords and Soldiers 2 was well-received when it launched on the Wii U, but as that particular console never really took off, it didn't reach quite the same scale of audience as the original. Definitely a good place to start if you've ever wanted to dabble. If you're a hardcore RTS veteran that grew up playing Dune 2 and Command & Conquer before graduating to Starcraft's ultra-twitchy systems, you might find Swords & Soldiers' design a bit limiting and simplistic, but there's a lot of folks out there who look at the genre and find the whole thing immediately intimidating. Build appropriate units to counter incoming forces, secure resources and gradually push your way into enemy territory. Some branch points aside, its battles play out on a side-scrolling 2D plane, with your team on the far left side, the baddies on the far right. If you've never heard of it before, Swords and Soldiers is a cute little lightweight real-time strategy game, arguably for people who are new at the genre or just not feeling up to micromanaging enormously complex armies. Alongside the announcement a PC launch (it's been out on consoles for yonks) for silly side-scrolling strategy game Swords & Soldiers 2: Shawarmageddon, they've made the original Swords and Soldiers HD free to grab on Steam for the next 24 hours and keep forever.

That's definitely what Awesomenauts studio Ronimo are doing today. It's quickly becoming A Thing in some circles that when you announce a sequel, you just throw the original at people for free.

Download swords and soldiers 2