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| The graphics are decent, but they're not amazing. |
You must take over villages in order to get gold for more troops. |
Well here we are again, a new RTS game to review, with potential to be above the 6.0 mark of many of the last ones. This game is simply a campaign as the Greeks or Trojans, attacking and defending. Instead of typical resource management the prized commodity, gold, is gained and lost through control of villages and slaying the enemy. Mission objectives are pretty basic, collect some things, kill some enemies, protect this, etc etc . A very unimaginative set of game objectives for sure.
Both sides have practically the same handful of units, as well as some supernatural ones such as skeleton warriors and Cyclopes'. You also get a couple of heroes who are a step above regular units. Surviving units can gain experience and move to the next mission. This of course sounds good, but I found with my style the only way to move to the next mission was to keep the units away from fighting. My attrition level was higher than I would have liked.
The game play itself was below average, perhaps a bit stale and common. What really made this game take a nose dive was its controls. When I first started to play I honestly thought my Logitech optical mouse batteries were dying or a driver was acting up. Upon tweaking and changing everything possible with a mouse I realized the game interface just simply sucked. The mouse would go awry at times and veer off at light speed. Then when grouping my units for orders the screen would center far away from the battle I was trying to prepare for. This combined with the world’s dumbest units who never really went where I wanted them too, made for a difficult review. Often times my units, which never moved in formation, would get slaughtered one at a time, with my rear guard suddenly going another direction towards some phantom enemy. The few troops left would just stand there as if they had no idea their mates needed them. Other times my troops would overshoot my order point by a long way only to get annihilated before I could try to get them back.
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| This is unquestionably a cool time period to wage war in. |
It's just too bad that it wasn't executed as well as it could be. |
In general the idea of taking villages for gold is a good one, but then to have to defend the same village with half destroyed troops who don’t follow orders is near impossible. At one point I started to just guess where my troops would go even though I gave them defined end points. This made my strategy of bull rushing a very tedious affair. For the most of what I could stand to play the only real strategy that worked was to build as many troops as you can and just send them in droves to attack. No need to keep any units in reserve because roving bands of enemies just lure them away and kill them.
Well with typical games I play that just don’t seem to go right there is always the crutch of the save game file. I would love to save a few times and figure out where I am going wrong. Well as you would have never guessed, this game doesn’t allow in mission game saves!! I just can’t understand why they would do that. As a reviewer I really have to bite my tongue and give every game a good try, yet this one has truly tried my patience as a gamer. There is no multi-player feature and I am guessing that was cut out when they couldn’t get the single player version to work right in beta testing.
The graphics and sound are very typical, with nothing really standing out as great or poor. Graphics detail is quite good, zooming in with the mouse wheel showed nice animations of the units and the landscape it pretty normal for 2004 RTS games. The sounds are very average, with the usual voice-overs for unit selections, battles and victories.
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| There are two campaigns for you to take part in: Trojan and Greek. |
Your troops can be a pain to control; they don't follow orders very well at all. |
This game is a special $19.99 PC game, and I am all for the cheaper games coming out. I am just not into games that don’t work right. The concept for a Trojan War game is excellent, and I hope more will come out. Perhaps a few patches in the future may make the game playable, but I just don’t see a budget game getting much after release work. If I had to give this game a simple rating it would be “thumbs down”. I wouldn’t recommend this to any gamer no matter what the price. Again I beg the PC game developers, quit releasing crap, put some time into making games work right the first time.
BATTLE FOR TROY VERDICT
This game is a special $19.99 PC game, and I am all for the cheaper games coming out. I am just not into games that don’t work right. The concept for a Trojan War game is excellent, and I hope more will come out. Perhaps a few patches in the future may make the game playable, but I just don’t see a budget game getting much after release work. If I had to give this game a simple rating it would be “thumbs down”. I wouldn’t recommend this to any gamer no matter what the price. Again I beg the PC game developers, quit releasing crap, put some time into making games work right the first time.
TOP GAME MOMENT
: Waging war against the Greeks as a Trojan is both satisfying and exhilirating. It’s too bad the missions aren’t more engaging.
