Ancient Wars: Sparta
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ESRB:
Blood,Violence
Publisher: Eidos Genre(s): Strategy Home Page: http://www.ancientwarssparta.com/
Like any self-respecting RTS game, Ancient Wars: Sparta features vehicles and mounts, including ships, chariots, elephants, battering rams and other siege weapons. Vehicles act as platforms for your troops, rather than being self-contained units in their own right. When you order your soldiers onboard a ship, they take positions along the deck and fight from there if an enemy comes into range. Naval skirmishes are action-packed: arrows and catapulted stones zip back and forth, you can ram into enemy ships or use grappling hooks to board them.
AW:S has three single player campaigns that consist of ten missions each. The story is told through dialogue between the main characters for each mission, who are portrayed with 3D model talking heads and mediocre voice acting. The expressionless dummy faces with no lip-sync animation are tough to watch at first, but once you get used to seeing your king's and heroes' faces on the normal game screen, the cutscenes won't look quite as bad. Good voice acting (the script would have to be better too) over some in-game camera work would be infinitely preferable, though. The opening demos and cutscenes feel like filler material, and are easily the weakest link in the game's presentation.
Ancient Wars: Sparta is built on a new, custom game engine, AWE. It supports partially destructible terrain and realistic physics effects, and the game takes every opportunity to showcase the new engine's capabilities. Shader effects, like water reflections, look very nice and effects are there for more than just the show: your slaves first have to douse the flames of a burning building before they can start repairing it. Pressing the ALT key highlights items that could otherwise be lost in the undergrowth. Overall, AW:S has found a nice balance between graphics detail and clarity. The game is responsive and feels well-optimized even before release, which is a very welcome change from today's norm of half-baked releases and incremental patching up. There are a few graphics glitches when you view the action from close up, such as flickering shadows and overlapping objects, but from the standard RTS perspective these are hardly noticeable.
Ancient Wars: Sparta should hit the stores on April 25. Try the public demo (a hefty download at around 900 MB) to get a taste of what's to come!
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