The first Making History on the PC was a strategy title that some reviewers compared to Risk, giving players a good balance between deep simulation and addicting gameplay. Muzzy Lane has returned with Making History II: The War of the World, which promises to improve on many key elements from the first game while staying true to what fans of the original enjoyed most.

Even if it is World War II.

At it’s core, Making History II is a WWII strategy title, but not any ol’ run of the mill strategy game. While the typical strategy game will have you stockpiling resources to build your units, Making History II forces the player to look at the larger world picture with an economy system that takes into account everything from a nation’s wealth to trade routes and even the efficiency of one’s infrastructure. As your nation’s economy grows, you will be able to improve your military by building military bases and research facilities. Each building that you construct not only helps to improve your military, but gives your nation bonuses as well.

Trading between nations plays a large role in Making History II as well. Making allies with nations that have resources you need can bring down their prices, and you can interrupt enemy trade lanes by placing submarines in the waters to take out enemy supply freighters. Players can also disrupt other nations economies the old fashioned way: bombing cities into oblivion. By selecting particular targets in an enemy’s capital city, your air force can deal crippling blows to the adversary’s economy or military production.

Of course, warfare is no fun by yourself. Forming and maintaining alliances is key to victory, and while some alliances will come easy for your nation, the game takes into account everything from one’s common enemies and ideologies to the financial risks of going to war in determining whether or not to ally themselves with you. Likewise, alliances can be broken if you do one too many things that your allies disagree with. Your enemies will also form alliances against you.

While Making History II’s single-player is more than enough to keep players engaged for countless hours, Muzzy Lane has made an impressive push with it’s online campaign in an attempt to change the way strategy games are played online.

Let’s say that you have friends. These friends want to play with you in a game of Making History II online but you can’t sit down for a stategy game with your friends because you have to get ready for a date — just for the sake of argument! With Making History II, that is not a problem. By simply logging on to the Making History website and starting a new game, you and your friends can play through your browser and at your own leisure. When you complete a turn in your game, an email will be sent to your friend informing them that it is their turn and visa versa. While this isn’t the first video game to do this sort of thing, this is one of the first times it’s being done on a non-flash, fully-realized PC title.

Additionally, Muzzy Lane has gone out of their way to ensure that modders have as easy of a time with their custom creations as possible. A common problem for many PC mods is that once the game is given a new patch or has a new update, some features in older mods may no longer work. With Making History II, the game will draw on data from older builds to ensure the mod works properly.

The build of the game I saw was pre-Beta, with the game going into full beta sometime in November. As of now, the scheduled release date is February 2nd, 2010.

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