Kombo's Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don't waste your time. This is why we've split our reviews into four sections: What the Game's About, What's Hot, What's Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.

What the Game's About
Take the stereotypical RPG formula of an amnesiac hero and a power hungry villain, and you have the primary concept of MagnaCarta 2. The game opens with an interesting concept of government rebellion and war. After the short introduction, the game begins to lose a lot of the interesting concepts the game opens with. Living in a small town with no memory of his past, the game's hero will slowly begin to remember who he was during the war and how he can stop evil from assassinating a princess and, thus, save the world.



What's Hot
Using the Unreal Engine 3, MagnaCarta 2 is graphically impressive, though a bit bland thanks to the engine, but the artistic style really makes the game appealing. Even with the negatives the Unreal Engine gives to game, MagnaCarta 2 is still quite vibrant and sharp looking. Characters are nicely animated and detailed, while the environments are fairly lush and full of enemies to do battle with.

The battle system is quite different from what'd expect from a RPG. With everything taking place in real time, you'll engage in combat with all the enemies you see on the map. The left trigger will change your stance between movement and combat. Once you get into the battle mode, your moves will appear on the right side of the screen and every move is mapped to the face buttons of the controller. To keep the battle system different enough from titles like Fable or even World of Warcraft, the battle system does have a limitation. Attacking too frequently will force you to cool-down your character. This will force you to wait for the gauge to go back to nothing before allowing you to attack again. It makes you use a more strategic approach while entering battle and gives it a more RPG feel. You can also swap controls with your party.

As you battle more and more, you'll need to assign each member of your party with certain options like attack the leader of the pack, only use healing techniques, and other basic battle options. Minus the party leader, the remaining members of the party are controlled by the computer AI. You do have the option to change the leader of the party on the fly and take control of any character you see fit for your battle style.



What's Not
The game offers nothing new, unique, or different from any other game, though. Everything feels generic and carries over everything from the RPG genre. Exploration is led by a map that directs you in the direction you need to go, and the side-quests are also utilized poorly. If you don't complete a side-quest before resting and leaving a village, the game won't allow you to come back and do them later. It's either do them there and then or don't do them at all. Everything else in the game is just hard to care about. The characters are not captivating and neither is the world they live in. It's hard to care if the world is conquered or destroyed in this game.

Final Word
MagnaCarta 2 is a generic RPG. If you want to play a RPG and want to indulge in a generic, very straightforward experience, then MagnaCarta 2 will give you some fun. With better RPGs available on the market, old or new, MagnaCarta 2 will keep you busy for some time, but it's in no way a must-play RPG for the Xbox 360.