The Wargamer

Rise, Fall and Rebirth

Right around the time Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos was released, I was growing very tired of the real-time strategy genre. I’d had enough of the blatant clones; the genre was growing more and more stagnant for me. I had loved many of the RTS games in the past. Even though I had not realized it at the time, when a friend and I were going at it for hours on end, Herzog Zwei on the Sega Genesis was quietly seeding my love for what would become a massive PC genre. I had loved the big names like WarCraft/StarCraft, Command & Conquer and Total Annihilation. I had fallen in love with the online play in Dark Reign, crawled through the dirt in the Close Combat series, and preserved every unit I could in the brilliant Myth games. But I was tired. The genre had just become dull, boring for me, and so after finishing WarCraft III, I took a long break broken only by piddling with the occasional real-time demo or game, but nothing ever stuck.

Perhaps if I had played Rise of Nations soon after, I could have defeated my long, dark year away from real-time strategy game. Well, it wasn’t quite that dramatic, but I didn’t play Rise of Nations until much later than its release. However, once I picked it up and hopped online, I was hooked. I was enthralled for months. Coupled with the visceral, squad-based fun of Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War, Rise of Nations brought me back to the genre. It was a brilliant mix of Civilization and Age of Empires, and although it wasn’t quite a revolution, it was certainly a breath of fresh air for me.

Rise of Nations was a very popular game. It spawned a wonderful expansion, and more recently, a true sequel. However, instead of taking the path of least resistance - churning out a lazy clone and quickly tossing the cash cow onto the market - Big Huge Games instead opted to create a very different beast indeed, but does it recapture the magic of the original?

This Ain’t Kansas

Whereas Rise of Nations was firmly rooted in the real world, spanning several ages of Earth’s history, Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends is set in an entirely new, original fantasy setting. Each of the three races is dramatically different from the other. The Vinci, the first race players meet in the campaign, are a steampunk race of humans with unit designs lifted from the mind of Leanardo da Vinci. The Alin, the second race in the campaign, are a desert-dwelling race based upon the Arabian Nights, with fiery genies and flying dragons as their units. Lastly, the Cuotl are a strange alien race with distinctly Mayan design, including both their large stone buildings and statuesque units.

The full Conquer the World campaign is broken into three smaller campaigns titled Vengeance (the Vinci), Corruption (the Alin), and Reborn (the Cuotl). Each campaign follows the main Vinci hero, Giacomo, on a long quest for vengeance. The Doge of Venucci, a Vinci dictator, kills Giacomo’s brother at the very beginning of the first campaign. Eventually, without giving too much away, Giacomo ventures into the desert lands of the Alin for the second campaign, and finds himself in the jungle for the final Cuotl campaign. Alas, the plot is average, at best, and the characters are very wooden. Even the linear repeat of the Rise of Nations Conquer the World play evident in each campaign wasn’t very compelling, as pushing my army across the maps was too simple and didn’t offer much in the way of replay value. I believe the allure of seeing and learning the new races kept me playing through the single player campaigns more than any desire to see how the plot might unfold, or what might happen to this or that character.