Ironically enough advancing into more modern game development tools made this Selectacorp game worse in pretty much every way than its precedessors except that it was stable and mostly bug-free.
In short the game is set in a fictional island nation called Dominion ruled by descendants of white European colonists. The player controls armies of a militant black uprising called PRF (Prime-something-something). Your goal is to take over the island, subjugate and dehumanize the white "minions" and make them heel under black "primes".
In no particular order of magnitude, first the goods and then bads.
The good:
Technical side
Technically speaking, the game works. Didn't experience a single crash and the only bug I found was that apparently there are no tech policies even though you can assign someone to be a minister of technology. You can even freely save and load the game instead of starting a new game to see the content you missed - the marvels of proper game development platform!
The bad:
The theme
While the game is about black dominance and subjugation of whites, it also echoes a ton of racist stereotypes. In other Selectacorp games the story is mostly about a (white) guy using combination of social engineering, blackmail, drugs and technology to outsmart their enemies and put women in situation where their only choice is to heel, with next to no violence, sometimes even "converting" women to their cause, becoming willing pawns for personal gain. None of that here. Primes only ever use brute force and almost all the sexual content is violent rape or rape under threat of violence.
The other major issue for me is the theme of war crimes. I've enjoyed the themes of dominion and subjugation in other Selectacorp themes, mostly because at the end of the day they are obviously nothing more than elaborate fantasies. The problem with Spoils of War 2 is that the atrocities in the game are a bit too real for my taste. The subjugation bit is still taken to 11 and entertaining in its absurdity, but it gets quite overshadowed by the constant rape and war crimes shown and implied.
Mechanics
To put it bluntly, the mechanics are extremely basic. You have some 10 or so provinces that need to be conquered, each with dozen or few locations. In each province you can have one base where you build buildings, recruit troops and declare edicts. Each location is guarded by enemy unit. Conquering locations gives resources which are used to build buildings and recruit troops. Enemy units never move, although unguarded locations slowly generate resistance each turn, which may lead to the location rebelling and spawning a new enemy unit to guard it. Bases can build and recruit instantly, so resources permitting, you can churn out as many units as you want every turn. The only limit is that the hex needs to be empty, so new units need to be moved away between every two recruitments.
The issue here is obvious: the game requires zero strategy. In my one and only playthrough I first churned out basic militia non-stop, using them to conquer and guard all conquered locations to stop rebellion. After getting some ministers I teched damage upgrades and spec-ops units. I then churned a few dozen of them out and then spent rest of the game recruiting basic militia to run behind them to guard the conquered areas. I didn't really need the spec-ops: they just move faster and hit harder, so I used them to make the game end faster.
Rewards / sexual content
Being an adult game, this is often the most important bit... And it leaves a lot to be desired, especially compared to older Selectacorp games.
Like most of their games SoW2 also has "priority target" list. Essentially its list of some random real world porn stars with some made up role in the game world. You capture them and can either add them to your personal harem, gift them to a minister to keep them loyal, put them on display, ransom them or kill them.
The "main girl" (playing role of a reporter) has some ~two dozen videos, mostly shown when you conquer a location, regardless of whether she's already been captured. If added to harem she has ~8 short clips with some mediocre acting in-world, with no sexual content outside stripping.
Everyone else has the same ~5 backgrounds that alternate every time you click their icon, with the same, single shot of their naked body pasted on top of these backgrounds. That's it. Other options consist of one image of being gifted, humiliated or shot respectively - thankfully the last one apparently is just some red dots drawn randomly on their naked body based on the one such picture I checked out of morbid curiosity.
Rest of the reward content is gained by conquering locations and consists of either still images portraying post-conquest prime culture of dominating "minions", mostly women. This was the most entertaining bit of the game in its sheer absurdity, really. The other half of conquest reward content consists of videos of rape, humiliation, rape, torture, rape and one murder, all of it with few lines of story text. The videos are portrayed as being from the secret internal files of the PRF, documenting secret missions and war crimes they've covered up.
Overall
I honestly can't recommend this game to anyone. I've played and enjoyed other SelectaCorp games (which already puts me in small minority I guess), but this game is just bad.
