Several years after the events of the first Inca game, there is an uneasy peace among the Incas and the Spaniards. The son of the great Inca leader El Dorado, Atahualpa, is not happy. He is arrogant and wants to prove himself. He steals the spaceship Tumi and takes it to an asteroid that has just entered near their home planet, only to find it to be a base for Aguirre and his forces. El Dorado hurries to help his son in a ship of his friend Kelt. They catch Atahualpa and leave the young hothead in the freighter, while they embark to fight Aguirre's fighters. Atahualpa wants to help and enters the combat with the old ship, but is soon killed, El Dorado wows vengeance.
In order to stop Aguirre's asteroid, El Dorado needs to wake his powers in three different locations of his empire. A couple of planet hoppings later, he can finally penetrate the asteroid and wake up his 3rd power inside of it, thus thwarting the plans of the evil space Spaniard once again.
One way of describing Inca II would be, that it is, in comparison to its predecessor, bigger and greatly improved in almost every way. It has more adventure elements, far smoother space combat, more story, which also means more bad voice acting, and more puzzles. It has also abandoned the password-based save system and now sports an autosave system, where each new segment gets its own save. But for some reason, it has abandoned the nice and simple maze system from the previous game, now forcing you to map the only maze of the game yourself. Perhaps sadly, there's no cheesy pop-rock song either this time around.
As the game takes place on several different planets, there's quite a bit of variation in the settings. After the first Incan world, you get to a place inspired by Australia, so it's mostly a reddish desert. Then there's a Tibetan world, a jungle paradise and some Eastern Island influences after you get to the Asteroid. The graphical improvements are actually quite noticeable, considering the first game had come out only a year prior.
There's quite a bit more pre-rendered animation used, especially many of the cinematics during scene transitions on the planets utilize this style quite excessively. In the Australian world, you see quite a bit of it during the train fight, when you are on a board of a train, blasting away swarming enemy ships. The first game pushed quite a bit towards more of a cinematic experience, this sequel positively swims in it and does manage to pull it off quite nicely. Which in itself is a bit of a miracle considering the age of the game and the tech they had in use.
Inca had a bigger emphasis on combat and the adventure style gameplay felt more like an afterthought. In Inca 2, there's a better balance between adventure gaming and action. It felt more like a half and half, but there are a couple of additional space combat bits you can choose to take part in. They aren't mandatory, but they can make the final battle a tad easier. On the first stretches of the game, you can also choose between two kinds of scenarios when you are playing as Atahualpa. You can choose between a puzzle or brawn approach before he takes his father's ship on a joyride. It's a shame, there is not more of this kind of branching, but at the same time, it is nice to see something like this in a graphical, cinematic extravagance made in 1993.
It's interesting, really. I've owned a CD copy of Inca II for, well decades but I never did really bother playing it. I'm not certain why, something about it just didn't manage to reel me in back then. But now, after playing through the first Inca, Inca II felt like a blast. It is cheesy and the acting left more than a bit of room for improvement. But it is, just like the first game, pretty fun. And considering it has improved the mechanics by a mile, it's even easier to approach than the first game was. Furthermore, there were other similar cinematic games done much later in the 90s that failed hard to achieve what Inca games managed to do at the infancy of cinematic, FMV based games.
As there are no official versions of the game sold anywhere as a digital download, so if you want it, you are more or less at the mercy of other, unofficial sources.
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