Cybergoon Game Reviews

MightyZog (9-01-05):
First off, let me apologize by not reviewing Rome Total War directly. It is a very similar game to Rome Total Realism (RTR), but it is not quite as polished. The original RTW was geared to a more 'commercial' audience, and thus was more arcade-like and had less depth. The original RTW would have reviewed more poorly than the RTR review you find here. But seeing as RTR is a free download, I highly recommend getting it!

RTR has a feel more similar to MTW, but with all the bells and whistles that RTW had. There are a LOT of units in RTR, whereas in RTW, the Roman factions had on the order of 2 or 3 times as many units as the other factions. There is great variety in the styles of gameplay between the different factions as well. For instance, you can start as the Selucids, with a great empire, but very little resources to hold it, with attackers on all sides. Or you can start as the Sarmaritans, who are spread out in the Asian Steppes, with very cheap cavalry units.

Other improvements over MTW include: a 'position-based' campaign map, rather than a 'territory-based'. That is, the position of your units and cities within a territory is important, and you can do things like blockade rivers or mountain passes.

Phalanx units are very interesting and quite impressive to watch. Standing like prickly porcupines, they can ward off attackers with their long pikes for quite a while, provided they are not flanked.

In RTW, units moved very fast, and they rarely got tired. This was fixed in RTR, and now, my unit of heavy swordsmen get tired often before engaging the enemy! Definitely much more thought is needed to employ them. Cavalry too, are just as in MTW, they fear the long reach of the phalanx, but quickly trample swordsmen.

A couple of things the game is missing: (1) A multiplayer campaign mode, and (2) a way to save battle replays done on the campaign map. Often time, AWESOME battles are fought during the campaign, and in MTW, I was always fond of re-living them over and over. However, this ability has been taken away from me with RTR.

Ratings

Overall: 8.0
Graphics: 8.6
Gameplay: 7.9
Originality: 7.2

Medieval Total War

MightyZog (12-01-03):
Contrary to Matt's opinion of C&C Generals, I was a bit dissappointed. The first couple of levels were fun, until it's micro-management flaws start to rear their ugly head. After this, I veered away from the RTS genre for a while. It wasn't until my friend Brian downloaded the demo for Medieval Total War, that I came back in the fold. Medieval Total war is the most fun and original game I've played in a lonng time, perhaps since TA, and that's saying a lot!!

The Campaign mode has been likened to Risk, but in my mind, the only comparison is that it uses the concept of 'territories' rather than 'grid squares' as the fundamental movement increment. The campaign mode really gives you a flavor of medieval europe in many ways. For example, you have a royal line, and if you ever have no heirs and your king dies, then the game is over! Needless to say, you should always make sure you have at least a couple heirs before you go shuffling them off to war. You build military units in batches of anywhere from 12 to 100 men, depending on the type of unit your are building. The stats for every man are kept separately, so men who keep surviving gain experience and become better fighters. Every army has a general, and generals can also gain experience and 'command'. Command is a very important concept in medieval total war, a general with good command makes every unit in his army better! You grant titles to your generals, giving them stat bonuses (eg, Grand Vizir, Count of Flanders, etc.), Your generals gain 'vices and virtues' depending on how they do in battle and in the campaign mode (eg, if a particular general flees from combat, he will gain a reputation for it, decreasing certain stats)

The Campaign game is pretty good, but where Medieval Total War really shines is in the real-time tactical combat game. This is the first game I've seen in a long time where battles regularly take place with hundreds of troops per side. Troops don't fight as well up-hill, and they get tired if they fight or march too long, spearmen are good against cavalry, Cavalry are good against infantrymen and infantrymen are good against spearmen. If units have poor morale (another stat), then they will break and run away if they are losing a combat. There are many other subtle nuances that serve to give you a good flavor of how medieval combat might have been. It's difficult to do the game justice through describing it, suffice it to say that the real time combat game is excellent at what it does.

One of the few things I don't like about the game is the fact that you would never assault a castle with more than a couple hundred troops in it. The game works in such a way that if there are a lot of troops in a castle, the castle will not have enough food to last more than a couple turns, and usually you can just wait until they run out of food, and give up.

Oh, and one more minor point, it lacks a multiplayer campaign mode, which would be AWESOME!!

I am looking forward to Rome Total War, due out late 2004, man what a wait!

Ratings

Overall: 8.5
Graphics: 7.6
Gameplay: 8.8
Originality: 8.6

C&C Generals

Matt G. (5-14-03, posted 12-01-03):
My official opinion on C&C Generals is it's the most fun RTS I've played in a while. There are a lot of nice features, and although it's no TA, there is no crap unit limit like Blizzard games (especially Warcrap 3). I am vividly reminded of the sense of fun I had with the first C&C, as well as Red Alert. The units, for the most part, are a lot of fun. The US has awesome bombers and helocopters, China has the Overlord (Mammoth Tank), flame tank, migs, and hackers, and the GLA (terrorist team) has some awesome units. They have truck bombs, hijackers, and suicide bombers who can even enter civilian cars and make car bombs. They use anthrax and toxin tractors and angry mobs. Defenses are worth building, although not strong enough in my book. Regardless, the balance seems fairly tight, and units interact in sensible ways.

The game is getting a good amount of attention from the developer in terms of fixing balance (which is pretty solid to begin with), and I've encountered no crashes or other such nastiness. Online play seems to work well, and it's lots of fun. The "commando" units are all different, and all useful. It's a lot of fun to sneak into someones base, plant 4 or so bombs on key buildings, and then blow them all up with one command, and with another send in the bomber fleet to clear the way for the tanks.

Check it out.

Warcraft 3

MightyZog (7-30-02):
After playing Starcraft and being spoiled silly by Total Annihilation/Uberhack/Demo Recorder, I was not expecting very much in terms of gameplay from Blizzard's latest. However, it turned out I was pleasantly surprised by the direction that Blizzard took with this game.

Let me give you some background to set the stage... Ever since the beginning of my real-time gaming experience, I have always wanted to see bigger and bigger armies with massive bases and lots of huge explosions. Starting with the original Warcraft, then C&C, Warcraft 2, and Starcraft, I felt that the scale of the battles never really increased to the epic scale that I had more and more the appetite for. And then came Total Annihilation. This game raised the bar on what (at the time) I thought RTS games should be. In this game, it was possible to dig in, creating an almost unbreakable defense, and it was also possible to create HUGE (500+ unit) armies of ALL KINDS of war machines. Everything from planes, boats, vehicles, robots, and hovercraft was available. More recently, my friends and I have downloaded several TA mods to make the game even BETTER!!

Anyways, since this is not a TA review, back to Warcraft 3... As you can imagine, my expectations were set pretty high, and I was never expecting blizzard to try and out-do Cavedog's TA. I was interested in the direction that they were taking, which is more of a RPG-esque approach. I was not prepared for the level of effort that they put into making the game very well balanced and focused on micro-management. Let me restate that last point, one which I was not expecting at all. Blizzard went in the direction of MORE micromanagement, rather than LESS. While the size of the armies was not on the scale of a TA, or even a AoE, this new direction adds to the RPG feel of the game, as well as makes for an interesting gaming experience.

Blizzard added several gameplay features which helped to make the micromanagement of armies easier. One is the "subgroup-cycling", which basically means that you can select all units of a given type WITHIN a selected group consisting of various different types of units. This is useful for quickly telling your spellcasters to dispel magic on your ultra-tough fighter units, for example. With the addition of the roleplaying aspect of multi-level heros, gaining experience or "leveling-up" is VERY important. Usually in the beginning of the game, players will go "creeping", or looking for neutral monsters to kill and gain experience. These monsters are usually found around valuable landmarks (goldmines, stores, etc.). This is an interesting twist, but it gets old rather quickly. It definitely keeps the early game interesting as it forces the players' armies out, increasing the odds of a random encounter, but in a more hardcore strategy game, I feel it would detract from the overall experience.

The races, so far are pretty balanced as far as I can tell, with my favorite being the humans, followed closely by the orcs. Each race has its differences, which forces each race's player to take a slightly different strategy. The different races are not COMPLETELY different, however. Each race has their own heavy hitter, aerial fighters, etc. But there are many non-trivial variations within these main classes. However, the differences between the races are not so great as to require a complete change of strategy from one race to another.

Another interesting "feature" that Blizzard added was the concept of "upkeep". What this basically means is that the more units you have, the less money you will make. If your units require more than 40 food, then you will only get 7 gold for every 10 that your peons collect. More than 70 food, then you will only get 4 (!!) gold for every 10. The food limit is capped at 90. What this does is increase the focus on micro-management, because you cannot simply out-produce your opponent. The end result is that the game is becoming more of a Myth-RTS hybrid, where can produce units, but they are much more severly limited. In the early game, the armies are almost always evenly matched, the winner is usually the person who knows his units better and micros more effectively. The kind of dynamic that this creates is more of a chess-type feel (albeit speed chess), requiring the player to have precise knowledge of his/her units, and being able to recall that knowledge quickly.

I had an annoying setup issue which I finally solved by consulting the already bloated warcraft 3 support forums. Basically, my computer kept randomly rebooting every now and then. After consulting the forums, and disabling just about every single feature that I had on my motherboard, I fixed it by turning down hardware sound acceleration to 'normal' from 'high' in 'dxconfig'.

In conclusion, Blizzard, stuck mostly to their tried and true formula, while improving some areas in order to make it easier to focus on micromanagment. The resultant game is a mix of Diablo, Myth and the traditional RTS, and while it is indeed a strange hybrid, Blizzard somehow makes it work. While I will be playing this game quite a bit in the short term, I think Total Annihilation will outlast it in the end.

Oh, and by the way, the graphics are beautiful.

Ratings

Overall: 7.5
Graphics: 8.2
Gameplay: 7.0
Originality: 5.6

Links:

warcraftIII.net* warcraft.org * warcraft3 on battle.net * the in clan * replays

Most of you know what I think about WC3. The graphics are amazing. The units are nice. Gameplay is better then Warcraft 1-2 and Starcraft. The Single Player story is intersting and engaging. The multiplayer AI is tough (damn rushes...).

But at the end of the day, its still not half the RTS TA is. TA is still the king of the RTS world, and it doesn't look like anything is going to change that for awhile.

gameplay 6
graphics 8
Overall 7