Rise of Legends isn’t an overcooked Tolkien-fantasy rendition of Starcraft. The word "fantasy" leads you to think of goblins, dwarves, and elves. I never saw any stinking goblins when I was playing. The inspiration for the two sides in the preview build, Vinci and Alim, come from two very off the beaten path fantasy worlds. The Vinci are a steampunk society complete with piston-driven giant robots clunking cannon balls across the map.
When was the last time you saw steampunk used to describe units in a real-time strategy game? On the other side were the mysterious Alim who come across as something out of a dark twisted version of Disney’s Aladdin. I for one think it’s great someone made a real-time strategy game that wasn’t styled after industrial sci-fi or cartoon-styled dungeons and dragons.
Play the Game, Slay the Beast, Click the Button
Interesting factoid: most preview builds don’t come with instruction manuals. So, I’m very impressed when I can get into a game without breaking my mouse in frustration. That said, I was able to pick up the mouse and get into Rise of Legends without any difficulty. The user interface was clean and right to the point. Pop-up boxes and text explained every icon I moused over, and buildings even prompted me to build more units when needed. I have some issues with the way you go about setting down a build location, though I’m unsure if the problem was due to the game or my erratic mouse clicking.
Once I got done marveling at the art styles and mousing the user interface in inappropriate ways I finally dug into playing Rise of Legends with a vengeance. With just a few clicks I turned enemy units into friendly units, and then gassed the crap out of the non-committals. A few more clicks saw my nation build up its war machine before the final march on my enemies, but I could have just as built my nation on a backbone of research or trade.
I can’t say that I’m now an expert on the game, but I can safely tell you that the game is fun, fluid, and deep. Special unit abilities, heroes, and city bonuses all came together to make for quick decisive battles. The bonuses come quickly and how you choose to advance feels more like an RPG than a traditional RTS. Because of these RPG-lite elements your nation feels like a character instead of that place where you build cannon fodder.
My only real annoyances were the lack of widescreen (1680 x 1050) monitor love, and the up close and personal viewpoint. This seems to be a common theme with RTS games of late, and I’m not sure how you feel but I miss being able to see things on a grand scale. Yes, battles are more personal this close to the action, but I get tired scrolling from one flash-point to the next.
Still, despite any camera complains I may have Rise of Legends is a beautiful and truly imaginative real-time strategy game. It’s great to see that high tech graphical wiz-bang effects used in this genre; that these amazing graphics are drawn so originally is just icing on the cake. This is one real-time strategy game to watch in what looks to be a busy year on the PC.
