Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends

"Mixing legends should be fun...right?"

After Big Huge Games created Rise of Nations (2003 strategy game of the year), they decided to create another game using the same game mechanics and replacing it's real world setting with a jumbled up fantasy one. If you have played Rise of Nations and not this, you may have been looking forward to this but believe me, this game only put the Rise of Nations franchise to shame.

This game is like any typical real time strategy game but with a few tweaks. The battle map is filled with a collection of cities and in a standard game your goal is to capture as many as you can while also capturing the cities that your enemy has obtained. These cities can be built up by attaching districts which will increase your army's capabilities depending on the faction your playing. The primary resource in the game is timonium, which is collected by constructing mines. Destroying these will bankrupt your enemy.

Another interesting aspect of this game is that they have adopted a "Warcraft-like" hero system where you can recruit strong individuals that level up over time to become more powerful and gain new abilities.

It may sound good so far but the game goes down a quick downhill slope.

The story of the main campaign is about a young inventor who belongs to a steam punk faction who chases an evil, unethical leader who goes by the name of "The Doge". This goes on for two of the three chapters and it by itself is not a bad story. However, after this story is finished at the second chapter, the third chapter involves being thrust into a particular situation with no explanation at all (similar to starting to read a book from the middle). The missions in the third chapter are also all the exact same grinding the entertainment value of this game to a halt.

The graphics in this game is not very good for graphics we can expect today as it looks almost the exact same as the graphics in Rise of Nations. The music and sound effects in the game is terrible. Some sound effects don't even exist for actions that really should have some (such as some explosion actions) and the music is bland, not adding to the game experience at all.

This game also has some serious pathfinding issues meaning that you will constantly be finding your units being stuck in corners instead of them moving to the location you want them to move to. This is a constant source of frustration in this game.

In conclusion, this game has an interesting story at the start and it has an ingenuitive spin on the RTS genre, but its main campaign drops off suddenly and the it has some bugs that were overlooked. If you like RTS and fantasy games try to give it a shot, but just don't expect too much.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 01/10/08

Game Release: Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends (US, 05/09/06)