Rise of Nations: Gold Edition

"Smite anyone who tells you not to buy this!"

Big Huge Studios' first game has shown that Brian Reynolds was a huge influence on the Civ games when he still worked with Sid Meier. Rise takes what were the best elements of the Age of empire games and adds some very unique twists.

GAMEPLAY
On first impressions you could be forgiven for thinking that this game is merely another rehash of the Age of Empires games but look a bit deeper and you will find some surprising additions. The concept of borders has been introduced and allows you to inflict attrition damage to any invading armies. Cities are the lifeblood of your nation and you are continually reminded to continue expanding by building additional cities to expand your nation and allow improved resource collection as you can only build so many farms, wood cutting camps and mines per city. Instead of building a single city and building up its defences for an entire game as in AOE you're forced to continually expand to the best of your abilities making for much better games and fewer stalemates. The technology tree is dealt up into several 'disciplines' - commerce, military, civic and scientific. Each of these is equally important making each upgrade option all that more important. Each of the available nations is differentiated quite markedly so there should be a nation available for every type of RTS gamer out there. Each nation has both special abilities and unique units that can be countered by other nations when in the right hands.

STORY
Rise of Nations Gold Edition includes several single player campaigns that make use of background stories. The original Conquer the World campaign is joined by several historical campaigns. These include the Cold War, Napoleon's conquests and Alexander the Great. The campaigns consist of a Total war style map made up of territories and armies, dependent of where you move your units each territory you attack will present a different type of mission allowing for short skirmishes or drawn out conflicts. The original campaign was set a bit too broadly but the new campaigns bring a welcome focus to the missions. An example of this is in the cold War campaign where the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam make up some of the missions. Other than these missions and campaigns there are no cut scenes and dialogue in the vein of Warcraft 3.

SOUND
The sound consists of your average music and unit chatter with no real remarkable or rubbish effects. Music consists of some average tunes made up of different music styles from the differing nations.

GRAPHICS
Rise makes good use of the AOE graphics engine with units looking quite good and some good-looking terrain textures. Otherwise it's your usual standard of RTS graphics.

REPLAYABILITY
With hundreds of permutations of play using different nations, units and tactics allows for a wide range of approaches to any type of level. The single player campaigns can last quite a while and skirmish and multiplayer add even more replayability. This game should last comfortably long.

RECOMMENDATION
With Rise of Legends coming out shortly, now is the perfect time to experience one of the most innovative RTS games of the last few years.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 10/20/05