RISE AND FALL: CIVILISATIONS AT WAR

Reviewer: Quercus Review Date: 28/06/2006 Score: not stated RaFCaW (sounds like someone being sick) is a typical RTS game with a difference - it is actually a brand of butter that likes dressing up in stockings and suspenders. Well, Maybe not. RaF uses the relatively standard (now) 3D environments and models that remind you of RTW and AOM, with the classical armies and figures (Romans Greek and Egyptian) that we are all used to seeing in such historic games. There is the usual resource management on offer, buildings and units to research and upgrade and enemies to beat up in battle. Standard stuff. The big selling point with this game though, is that although it has hero figures (as AoM did), the hero figures are actually pivotal to the game and dominate the battlefield, because you can take direct control of them (in third person perspective) and run around cutting swathes through the enemy ranks with relative ease. It sounds corny but it is actually great fun - it feels a bit like Lord of the Rings and this is how you should view it rather than the tactical battle management of the Total War series. The other nice touch is the sea combat and the way ships have been designed - not only can you use these to attack other ships by firing at them, but you can ram them (if you have a sailor on board), or grapple them, which enables you to board them with your own troops. You can also use them as mobile barracks, creating certain basic troops directly on the ship. There are frustrations though - the multiplayer version of the game (accessible as a skirmish game in the demo with one computer opponent) complicates things to provide a decent balance. Your hero is weaker and needs stamina for you to control them. All well and good except you need to use glory (mainly gained through combat) to increase their level and you only start gaining stamina once they get to level 2. The skirmish games also have a large number of neutral outposts that you have to deal with (or not in the case of computer opponent that kept sending triremes directly to where I had started) and these seem very tough - the troops that keep spawning from the outpost are tough and you need to throw a lot of troops at them to deal with them and destroy the outpost before more enemies appear. I suspect siege weapons would have helped but at the time I had to stop playing they weren't available to me (it looks like some build options are based upon the level of your hero). It is a fun game though and as long as the price isn't excessive, I may well be tempted to buy it. The only real problem I foresee with it is that from our point of view, it may be too much of a departure from the tactical battles in the Total War series for some people.