In practice, however, choosing your character at the start is barely relevant. You will play with the four heroes (male/female Warrior and male/female Wizard) anyways, since the other three characters will appear later in the game and join you.

Your adventure starts in a swamp and you have to escort a woman to a nearby village. This basically means killing everyone in your way and not dying until you reach a certain point of the map. Then you achieve victory and go to the next map.

The maps are what anyone could expect from a 90s RTS; rectangles of undiscovered territory hidden by the fog of war. It has a graphic style reminiscent of a less cartoony Warcraft II, with more varied terrain, weather changes and a day-and-night cycle.

You'll eventually reach the city of Plagat, a greatly presented menu where you can buy equipment, talk with NPCs and companions, hire mercenaries, train you characters and start more missions.

As you start to hire more units, you'll truly notice the hybrid nature of the game. There's no resource management, base-building or unit-producing, but the basic and most important mechanic of the game is the micromanagement of units. It even has functions like assigning keyboard numbers to different groups of troops – though formations are sadly missing.

In every map you have some objectives to accomplish, usually killing some particular monsters or reaching a certain part of the map. There's no indications or marks on the map so exploration is necessary, which may lead to additional battles or hidden items.

You move your units, fight the enemies, usually using a lot of hit-and-run tactics, (don't feel guilty about it, enemies use it too) and little else. You have to be fast and skilled enough with your mouse since the game is hard and there's no way to pause and issue orders.