Hundred Swords

"Good premise ruined by annoyances."

I'm not a huge fan of RTS games. I think that the entire genre has many problems with it that developers never seem to notice. Hundred swords is one of those games. Despite the colorful and pretty graphics, easy to understand play mechanics, variety of play options, and my initial desire to like this game, it spoils in the actual playing.

Hundred swords is basically a tactical battle game, with a few RPG elements thrown in to spice up the storyline. You choose between four kingdoms, each of which have a specialty in a certain area, such as cavalry, magic, armored infantry, or archery, and you deploy your troops to defeat enemy soldiers, capture resource mines, and destroy their fortifications. Skill is required in order to accomplish this, as certain kinds of units fare better in combat against others, a paper scissors rock dynamic.

What makes this game different from the likes of Starcraft and Command and Conquer is the Unit Leader system. Each kingdom has 8 leaders that can be deployed to the battlefield, each specializing in a different weapon. Each leader can have from ten to twenty soldiers under their command. These soldiers act as a unit, acting together, rather than one at a time. Clicking on any member selects the entire group. This is good for broad brush unit deployment, but rather annoying when trying to achieve formations.

Another difference is the structure building aspect. In order to mine resources, a leader must construct a mining structure over the pit. Thankfully, once the structure is built, it works automatically and gradually draws the resource from the mine, without requiring workers moving back and forth. The only structures that you build other than resource mines are barracks. Barrack allow a commander to recruit more soldiers of his type, up to his command limit, and also refill his units hit points. Barracks can be upgraded in order to build armored robots called golems, flying transport airships, or long range magic artillery.

The in game graphics are small 3D models of individual soldiers. They have a variety of animations, such as walking, fighting, and looking around, and are easily distinguished from enemy soldiers as well as each other. You never lose track of them in combat. The terrain is also 3D, but sometimes its tough determining where you soldiers can march and where they can't. Commanders have large colorful portrait that add to the character of the game.

The sound effects during the battles are par to other games. When soldiers fight you hear the clang of steel and the sounds of arrows flying through the air. The rivers make gurgling noises, and when your view is over a mining facility the chugging or machinery can be heard.

The music is of the medieval variety. The tracks go well with each kingdom, and fit the mood of the levels, but aren't very memorable.

The meat of this game is playing through the campaign mode, which follows the characters of a single nation and pits your armies against enemy troops, with different objectives for each level. The cutscenes in between battles give you insight into the story, and are sometimes intercut with still pictures which are usually cool.

To supplement the campaign mode, you can play Mission mode, which gives you a list of different encounters sorted by difficulty. You receive a grade based on how many losses you had and how long you took to beat the mission.

If all the above interests you, heres a word of warning: Hundred Swords has very bad play control, interface, AI, and strategy. You cannot select more than one squad at a time, making moving lots of troops annoying as it tends to stagger you troops movement, instead of arriving all at once. There are no keyboard hotkeys, so you must use the mouse for everything. You units have no pathfinding. If you tell them to go somewhere, they will walk in a straight line there, and if they run into something, they will get stuck up against it and stay there until they die. You can set waypoints to walk, but you cant attack from a waypoint. When you tell a leader to build a resource mine, all the soldiers under their command tend to cluster up around it, preventing them from getting nearby to construct it. The enemy AI is so pacifistic that unless they are doing a scripted event, they stay still until you attack them. There is no fog of war, so you can see the entire battlefield at all times. You can only have a maximum of 100 soldiers and 30 buildings in play at a time, so if you want to deploy another commander, you have to kill off one of your grunts. Once your mines have sapped the resources from a pit, they are of no use except to count against your 30 building limit, so you must annoyingly destroy them, which counts against you losses in the final grade. The enemies also sap the resources from the mines they are on, so unless you quickly take over enemy mines, you will find yourself strapped for cash later in the missions.

So basically you build up an army of whatever kind of unit that kills the closest enemy troops you can see, send a mass of men at them, hope that they kill them by sheer numbers, build a barracks to heal them, repeat till you win.

Hundred Swords is an interesting premise, but ruined by frustrating flaws and mediocre gameplay.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 02/17/02, Updated 02/17/02