A few years ago I visited Larian Studios, the Belgian developer behind the Divinity series. I was there to see how development of Divinity: Original Sin 2 was going, but I had another game on my mind: Divinity: Dragon Commander. A strange fusion of Total War-style strategy and choice-heavy RPG, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever played before or since.

Over dinner I found myself talking to Jan Van Dosselaer, the man responsible for writing a huge amount of Dragon Commander. After explaining to him how much I loved the game, despite its horrendously messy real-time strategy combat, I asked if there was any chance of a sequel. The table, headed up by Larian CEO Swen Vincke, laughed the question aside. Apparently there wasn’t a chance of me ever seeing Dragon Commander 2.

Skip forward three years to 2019, and Larian has recently announced Divinity: Fallen Heroes, a game being made in collaboration with Logic Artists. Interestingly, it is not the sequel to beloved RPG Divinity: Original Sin 2 that many expected and hoped for. Rather, Fallen Heroes is actually a turn-based tactics game in the lineage of Fire Emblem; a fusion of XCOM-like tactical missions and choice-heavy RPG chapters.

Wait a minute… is this a new Dragon Commander?

In Divinity: Original Sin 2, combat is one of many components that make up a sprawling role-playing epic. But in Divinity: Fallen Heroes, that very same combat system is firmly in the spotlight; the game, like XCOM, is a series of challenging combat missions featuring tactical objectives that must be achieved using the abilities and spells of a crack team of god-like heroes, amusingly known as the Apocalypse Squad (Divinity’s Terry Pratchett-like edge is definitely still here).

The combat engine is a complex, unforgiving tinder box of elements that are in constant war with each other.

It’s a design that makes perfect sense; Original Sin 2 has the most intricate and ambitious combat system of any RPG you could care to name, and so to build a new game upon it seems only natural. If you’re unfamiliar with Divinity’s turn-based combat engine, it’s a complex, unforgiving tinder box of elements that are in constant war with each other. If you stab a soldier they’ll bleed, and that pool of blood can then be frozen into a slippery trap that’ll trip over anyone who steps across it, knocking them out cold. Amazingly, that’s just a simple example.

But Fallen Heroes wouldn’t be a Divinity game if it were not also an RPG in some form. Story and choices unfold onboard the Lady Vengeance; a battle ship you and your team of heroes call home. Akin to how the story is told between battles in a Fire Emblem game, it is on the Lady Vengeance that you can discuss previous missions and future plans, unveil the story’s lore, and make decisions that Larian promise will have lasting, sometimes devastating impacts on the world of Rivellon.

With Original Sin 2 fresh in the memory, it seems a little odd that a Divinity game would wrench its components apart and create, to some degree, two separate entities; a turn-based tactics game and a visual novel-like RPG. But this delivery allows for a very different battle focus; rather than being encounters with enemies that you meet as part of a wider quest, each mission has to be a narrative experience in itself. Objectives chain together and demand specific outcomes, creating a very different form of challenge.

More than that, though, this two-component structure harks back to Larian’s most unusual title: the aforementioned oddity Dragon Commander. The story chapters set on Fallen Heroes’ Lady Vengeance are even identical in presentation to Dragon Commander, itself also set on a warship. Choices made in dialogue open up options for combat, but in Fallen Heroes that combat is the intricate systems of Original Sin 2, rather than Dragon Commander’s mess of unwieldy steampunk legions and jetpack dragons.

Divinity: Fallen Heroes, then, is a chance to reignite the embers of Dragon Commander; it preserves the brilliance of its interactive storytelling and guillotines off the worst bits, replacing them with something superior.

So that’s Fallen Heroes in concept, but what about practice? My hands-on sees a squad of four heroes attempt to save three groups of civilians who are spread across a sizable city courtyard. Leading the group is Lohse, one of Original Sin 2’s most memorable characters. She’s backed up by three nameless adventurers who fulfil the healer, rogue, and warrior archetypes. It is through careful use of the team’s complementary and contrasting skills that I save… some of the helpless civilians from death at the hands of a band of ever-reinforcing marauders.

Alongside spells and abilities that will be familiar to Divinity veterans, Fallen Heroes allows you to take two single-use artifacts into each battle. For this mission I have a set of Teleporter Pyramids, which are used to set up two portals for instantaneous travel across the map. They can be used to make saving civilians a painless job, but I mis-click and set the portals up an inch apart. The rescue mission becomes rather more painful.

As a beefy lad with a sword longer than himself attempts to cleave my healer in two, I use the second of my artifacts: a cow bell. The magical instrument instantly transforms the swordsman into a fine bovine specimen who’s easily turned into tomorrow’s pie filling.

As is Divinity tradition, though, the mission soon shows me that it’s unwise to use all of your lifelines too soon. After scraping an evacuation by the skin of my teeth, Lucian the Divine - a key player in Rivellon’s lore - turns up and butchers my entire team. Through a sly smile, I’m told by Larian that the cow bell works on bosses. I’d wasted my golden ticket to victory.

Unfortunately I now have four dead heroes, and thanks to the magic of perma-death there’s little chance I’ll ever get them back. I’m informed resurrection does exist in Fallen Heroes, but it won’t be an easy process.

Fallen Heroes is a chance to reignite the embers of Dragon Commander.

The second mission in the demo involves a new element: Sulphurium. Land in a pool of this vomit-coloured substance - be that from a magical fall, or knocked back into it by the force of the game’s new firearms - and you’ll be hurled away by a kinetic shockwave. Like everything in Divinity, this can be a force for chaos or ingenuity. One wrong move around it can cause not just the death of your enemies but also half of your squad. A more calculated move, however, can see you rocket jump a hero across multiple patches of Sulphurium and up into an advantageous tactical position.

It seems that Larian and co-developer Logic Artists are stretching their tactical muscles with this new application of Divinity’s combat system. It’s exciting to imagine what kind of puzzle-box scenarios each of the missions will provide. But after chatting with Larian’s writers, I’m equally excited to see where Fallen Heroes takes the narrative of Rivellon.

The game’s narrative is described as being akin to Das Boot, a German WW2 film in which the crew of a U-Boat suffer the horrors of being in uncomfortably close quarters while the world falls apart above them. Fallen Heroes’ team of hot-headed heroes are stuck on the Lady Vengeance together, and all have different approaches to the doomsday scenario that’s snapping at the hull. Seeing how Fane, an undead character who’s seen so many apocalypses that they’ve become a trivial nuisance, deals with the actions of the empathetic Lohse is sure to be fascinating, especially when the game requires you to pick a side.

But, more than that, I’m delighted to see Divinity: Dragon Commander get a spiritual successor. Larian’s most awkward creation finally has the missing piece to its puzzle, and I can’t wait to see it reborn like a particularly fiery phoenix that will, if my experience with Divinity is anything to go by, set the entire place on fire and cause the smokey demise of my foes.

I’d like to think that my enthusiasm for Dragon Commander at that dinner back in 2016 is the reason behind Divinity: Fallen Heroes’ creation. But let’s face it, the only thing more stupid than that line of thinking is trying to organise a legion of steam-powered tanks while simultaneously controlling a jetpack-powered dragon.

Matt Purslow is IGN UK's News and Entertainment Writer and Divinity fanatic. You can follow him on Twitter.