Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Ron Burke

May 20th, 2003 was the launch of Rise of Nations.  Designer Brian Reynolds of Civilization and Alpha Centauri fame had just founded Big Huge Games and Rise was their first title.  The game blended aspects of Civilization, Warcraft, Command & Conquer, and many other genres and titles.  The mix was a dangerous risk, but it paid off, rocketing the game into an incredible number of Top 10 lists for 2003.  Thinking back to 2004 I recall being ushered into a small office to check out a game called Rise of Legends.  It took a moment to realize that this title was a sequel to Rise of Nations.  Gone were the different ages present in the original title, and now there was a storyline.  It looks like Big Huge Games had once again changed the landscape.  Would this new mix pay off as well as the original?  After a long wait, I finally got my hands on the title to find out.

Rise of Nations featured battles between many nations, each with their own special units and powers.  Rise of Legends ditched the Dark Ages and fast forwarded very far into the future.  Getting away from age of Caesar and knights, we move into the realm of the Vinci, the Alin, and the Cuotl.  The Vinci are steampunk, relying on clockwork technology and steam-powered tanks.  When the battle turns to the sands, it is the desert-dwelling Alin that take center stage.  Their power is based on the magic of fire, glass, and sand.   The final stage of the game centers around the shielded jungle-dwelling Cuotl.  Using weapons that center around strange energy and powerful religion, their units are made of moving stone.  The game begins with a great cutscene that demonstrates the heart of the conflict between the Vinci and the Alin, and so begins my review.

The cutscene I just mentioned is worth watching more than once.  It is very well done, and whatever development house built the game’s cutscenes should be commended for their work.    There is a great deal of love and attention paid to the graphics in this game in general.  All three of the factions in the game are worlds apart, allowing the artists to completely go wild with detail.  For instance, the clockwork men of the Vinci undulate as you would expect a thrown-together machine made of cogs and scrap steel to move.  Flying craft use the spiral gyrocopter look that DaVinci drew in his early designs of flying craft.  More impressive than the host of units is the buildings of the Vinci.  Unlike traditional RTS titles, your city is built in districts and are all interconnected.  The different districts interconnect with bridges, piping, and steel braces, their smoke stacks belching smog into the sky above.  This is a civilization that embodies true Technocracy – their world is ruled by invention. 

The Alin are very much based on Middle Eastern mythology and religion.  Their buildings are floating castles with glass parapets and spinning shards circling the golden towers.  Red flags whip in the air as spiral staircases encircle the entirety of the city.  The units of the Alin are equally detailed and opposite of the Vinci.  They are often organic in nature, and very much magical.  Sand striding scorpions, giant golems made of glass, dragon elementals made of flame, and whirling dervishes make up just a few of the Alin army.

The final side of Rise of Legends is the Cuotl.  If the Alin is a step away from the Vinci in nature, the Cuotl is on the other side of the world.  A hybrid of Mesoamerican culture, technology from a crashed space ship, and religious power, the Cuotl world is awesome to behold.  Rooted in the deep jungle, their stone-come-to-life armies are comprised of animated stone snake statues, jaguars, and idols.  Their world is lush and organic, while their buildings are angular and sharp.  It looks like somebody got Mayan culture in my Protoss, or Protoss in my Mayan culture…one or the other.

You are able to zoom in the camera and rotate it 360 degrees.  Zooming in reveals much of the detail that I discussed, but the vast majority of the time you’ll be playing from a completely zoomed out position.  Unfortunately, this does create a bit of a mess as the fantastic special effects are hard to separate during larger battles.  Still, it is a minor nuisance when compared to the incredible detail work.

The other issue with the graphics is that it requires a bit of a beefy system to keep the framerate stable.  The minimum requirements are a 3Ghz processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 128mb videocard, with a suggestion to use a 6800 or x800 or better for the ‘best’ experience.  Gone are the days of running an RTS on an outdated computer, you need to catch up with the times to get all the graphical eye candy.  I, for one, am glad of it.  I’m tired of shoddy graphics in my RTS titles.  It is time to catch up, if you haven’t already.

A pattern of opposites presents itself in this game often, the most obvious being between the technology heavy Vinci and the magic heavy Alin.  It is in a similar fashion that the sound and graphics are polar opposites.  While the graphics are rich and varied, with incredible detail and animation, the sound is drab and lifeless while also managing to be oddly random.  Many games have used adaptive soundtracks to ramp up the tension during battle, or tone it down during stealth.  Rise of Legends seems to roll the dice and randomly assign music regardless of what is going on in the battlefield.  During my heaviest clash with literally 100 or more combatants ripping each other apart, the game decided it might be a good time for some slow and gentle music.  Odd doesn’t quite cover it.  What I found most irritating is that there is no real audio indicators that a city is under siege.  In fact, a city can be seized from your grasp with only a flash on the minimap to indicate that a small war is happening in one of your provinces.    Overall, the music and sound and music are just uninspired, which is a tragedy considering how well done nearly everything else is.

The controls in Rise of Legends are fairly standard RTS fare, but there are quite a few hotkeys built into the game that will allow you to quickly traverse the expansive maps to control massive armies.  While this won’t really make a big difference in the single player as the game never moves at a pace that requires shortcuts beyond CTRL-1 and the like, it makes all the difference in the world in online multiplayer.  Players who use shortcuts will be on you with their heroes while directing their armies in coordinated teams to cut you to ribbons if you aren’t using them yourself.  There is certainly an advantage for dexterous players. 

The camera controls are simplicity itself.  The third mouse button allows you to zoom in and out, as well as allowing you to rotate the camera.  Setting a team using CTRL and a number, and then hitting that number on the keyboard will select a team.  Hitting it again will center the camera over that unit set.  The function keys select your individual hero units.  In one particular mission I had 7 hero units on the battlefield, so you get used to using the function keys to select individual heroes to use their powers. 

Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends is three games in one.  One thing that was brought over from the original title is the Conquer the World map, except now you get to experience it with three races that literally have nothing in common.   Each will require a completely different strategy, as brute force isn’t always the best option.  Since Big Huge Games has included a storyline, albeit a somewhat disconnected and unexplained one, there is a story arc that you will follow as you slowly work your way across the map.  You’ll follow Vinci inventor Giacomo in his quest for vengeance against the Doge, a fellow user of Vinci technology who has killed your brother.  You’ll start off with a small army and a starter city that you must build up via districts to create armies to crush your enemies.  Using each faction's powers and building processes, you’ll build a mixed-unit army large enough to crush the enemy cities and conquer the map.  While each faction uses a different method to build their cities, the objectives are often the same – take over all cities on the map.  There are a few missions that require you to escort somebody, or to guard a particular person for a specified amount of time, but overall you are simply building up forces and crushing your enemies on a variety of maps.  Over time, you’ll note that the enemy AI system really can’t formulate specific tactics to capitalize on their specific strengths, so they rely on the meat-grinder method of overwhelming you with troops to accomplish the same objective. 

There is an elegant beauty to the interface for Rise of Legends.  Micromanagement such as resource gathering is relatively painless, and once you get your financial juggernaut moving, you really don’t have to maintain it much.  Other innovations such as borders and attrition are well integrated into the gameplay to change the experience into something other than the usual RTS fare.  Borders are the areas in which you can build, and they expand as your city influence grows.  They also expand as you capture or convert other cities.  While your army is within your borders, you do not take attrition.  Attrition is a slight bit of damage that affects all units as they are not ‘in supply’.  You can often remedy this with special powers or special units.  Some battles are difficult enough where attrition could be the difference between victory or defeat, so don’t think that it doesn’t add up over time.

What truly amazes me about Rise of Legends is the fact that all three factions are completely balanced.  It is probably the thing that caused a rumored fourth faction to be cut from the game, and also caused a long development cycle, but there is literally a relatively even advantage with each faction.  What is even more amazing is that ground troops are important in this game!  Games like Command & Conquer and other more recent RTS titles treat ground troops like fodder.  They are useless when tanks or aircraft are around, so there is often very little reason to build them, except as fodder.  In Rise of Legends, they are the only unit that can siege a city (unless you deplete a city to zero health), and they are the only unit that can storm a city to capture it faster.  They can be countered by units with the trample ability, or taken out by other units on the field.  As your city grows you’ll get some ground troops for free, so it hardly feels like you have to churn them out.

After every battle, you are given an overview of the land area.  This is the Conquer the World map – it will look familiar to anyone who played the previous title.  There are often several enemy hero units on the field of battle.  The name invites the conclusion that you are to Conquer the entirety of the map, but you simply have to cross the field of battle and take out the enemy capitol to move forward to the next campaign.  There are some additional objectives for the second and third campaigns, but essentially it boils down to the same thing.  It would have been nice to have a Risk-like battle system, but this mode feels like a blanket to cover a linear battle progression. 

I could write a 25 page review talking about how all three factions play against each other and still miss something.  Little differences between the three factions make this game engaging and fun.  The Demo did such a terrible job of showing this fact.  The gameplay, while deceptively linear and somewhat repetitive, is actually quite a bit of fun.  There is a great deal of challenge in the game, even for a RTS expert.  Where the game truly shines, however, is in its multiplayer aspects.

Many RTS titles are balanced for only one difficulty level, if they have difficulty settings at all.  Rise of Legends has three difficulty levels, with moderate being the ‘sweet spot’.  Moderate provides a decent challenge without being obscene – anything higher and you can expect an incredible challenge.  This challenge ramps as you move through the campaigns and, in a way, resets to the default once you get to the next chapter.  You won’t plow through this game easily.

Multiplayer is a great deal of fun, and is where human to human challenge lies.  There is a local network play option, as well as online play for up to 8 players.  When you connect to the network it immediately updates your client, requiring that all players be using the same version.  The Gamespy-powered (although thankfully not requiring a separate install) matchmaking service was fairly terrible upon launch.  Thankfully, this has been essentially resolved and the service is functioning properly.  Once you get online, you’ll find that there are a few more aspects of the game that are yet to be revealed.  You can use team play and diplomacy to your advantage in the multiplayer game to help turn the tides of battle.  Multiplayer can be set up to play themselves out as a massive battle taking hours to resolve, or it can be set up as a quick skirmish battle.  There is even a ladder system and a stat tracking system for those who insist on playing until they are announced as ‘better than their friends’ publically.

There is a great deal that Rise of Legends does correctly. While it is not as revolutionary as its predecessor, it does evolve the series and the genre. Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends features the best balance I’ve seen in an RTS – ever. It bears so many of the hallmarks of a well oiled and complete game, it is a shame that it also bears a few marks of a rushed product. That said, it is certainly near the top of a short list of great RTS titles. If you are a fan of the genre, it is worthy of the price.

Gaming Trend Score

88

1. Graphics: 92
2. Audio: 80
3. Controls: 90
4. Gameplay: 89
5. Value/Replay: 85
6. OVERALL:88