Gamers are thrown into the ancient world, and follow the stories of many historical moments in history. The game features two separate campaigns that follow the story of Cleopatra leading her Egyptian army against an Roman invasion, while the other allows gamers to assume the role of Alexander the Great in his attempt to successfully lead his Greek army to triumph against Persia. There are quite a few historical mentions throughout both stories including Gaius Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, and even Achilles. So, the premise of the game is set up exceptional well, however, Rise & Fall: Civilizations at War often poorly executes such historical moments making them very forgettable.
While some of the events throughout the game are accurate, such as Cleopatra’s retreat from Egypt due to the Roman invasion, the game feels somewhat lacking without key battles. Another issue is that there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of diversity between each team. Certain teams will have unique units that only they can produce, but the overall detail of units means that it's hard to distinguish between one another. The structures have very few differences between one another making it difficult to say “That’s clearly an Egyptian building”. This is a very minor detail that some gamers might not concern themselves with, but when other games such as Age of Empires III, among others, have built such diverse armies beforehand, which creates a real feel and power to each team - this feels like a step back in the RTS evolution.
Rise & Fall is very similar to previous medieval RTS games before it. Gamers will be able to harvest gold, wood and glory, which is a resource gathered from building structures, killing and exploring. All these resources go towards building units, structures, or in the case of glory, level up your heroes or hire advisors that enable certain global bonuses, such as health extensions, plus abilities to allow you to build units quicker and harvest resources at a faster rate.
'I want my elephant!'
One of the major differences between previous RTS games and Rise & Fall is that the game implements a rather intriguing third-person action sequence. You see, in the game, gamers get to individually control some of the historical figures mentioned above. Gamers can level up their heroes and are eventually able to drop down into a third-person perspective and run around as the hero/heroine and cause havoc, or simply open-up gateways with much more ease. For instance, in the RTS view you could get one of your troops to place a ladder on the enemy’s wall, drop down into hero mode and control your hero over the wall, kill some baddies and release the switch to the door, which will make things a bit more easier than ramming down the walls.
In that sense, the hero mode does open quite a few excellent possibilities, however, much like everything else in this game, it is poorly executed, making the novelty of such an idea grow quite boring. There are several issues that persist that just make the hero mode a big hit-and-miss feature. The game turns into a very straight forward hack-and-slash game, where your hero can eliminate several squads of enemies without any issues whatsoever, although your hero was useless when in RTS mode. Combat in this mode is very boring. All you are doing is simply pressing the left-mouse button the whole time - there are no combos or special abilities to execute, which would’ve been a nice addition. The animation during these sequences is very forgettable, and the fun wears thin quickly.
The RTS features aren’t much better either. The game presents some real fascinating new ideas to the genre, which we hope future games will pick up, but there are so many common RTS issues that hurt the overall experience. The good first; the game features some fantastic naval battles where it feels as though it is the sort of thing that would’ve happened during these times. Gamers are able to load units onto ships, and even hire speciality troops that enable gamers to ram boats, hook on to other ships that allow gamers to quickly board them. This is a fascinating idea, giving a very ruthless and pirate-like feel to the naval battles. Another interesting addition is the inclusion of ladder units. These units can place ladders next to walls that enable gamers to have a bit more fun with siege battles. However, these neat features are pushed aside when clumsy mishaps plague the entire game.
The naval battles are probably one the highlights of the entire game.
The issues that persist throughout the entire game are just real silly mistakes. Units have terrible path finding, the AI is dreadful, there are no unit silhouettes and everything eventually just falls apart. Units would often get stuck on objects. We found that units would often not react to commands and would have a terrible sense of their surroundings. You could be bombarding an enemy town with catapults and twenty-or-so enemy units would run pass them and not even bother to attack. These issues just make the game far too easy when facing computer opponents, and extracts any fun the game had going for it.
Due to the nature of the game, and how you form armies, it is a very slow game. Gamers will have to gather resources, build over half-a-dozen structures, and hire a hero before even beginning to weigh-up the decision to take on the enemy. In order to get stronger units you will need to level up your hero, and in order to do that you must continue to build structures and explore the map. It opts a bit of a turtle-like strategy where gamers are expected to sit back and take advantage of the game’s siege options. Rise & Fall expects gamers to build virtually everything before being a force to be reckoned with – which in all honesty can make the game a little boring, especially when facing impatient opponents in multiplayer.
Speaking of multiplayer, the game supports up to an eight player multiplayer mode on a variety of maps. This, along with the skirmish mode, does offer a bit of fun and can often be a bit interesting compared to facing computer opponents. However, multiplayer games can take a long time to complete. Each gamer can control their heroes whenever, and can easily wipe out your attacking enemies quite quickly, meaning you’ll have to go back and horde more resources and units to assault again. Thankfully, there are options to avoid such problems that allow gamers to start with a certain amount of resources, or different winning conditions.
I can fly, I believe I can touch the sky...
Graphically, Rise & Fall seems a tad dated. The scenery often looks quite nice, but there are some real questionable choices that overshadow the good. For some reason the game has a laughable draw distance. You have a terrible sense of vision when in the third-person perspective. Objects will appear out of nowhere when you move closer, and even when changing the angles in the RTS mode things still have a fairly average draw distance. In all honestly, we couldn’t think of a single RTS game that has ever had a lower draw distance. Animation isn’t very appealing, detail is lacking and the modelling on some of the structures is just very uninspiring, and as mentioned previously, none of this creates an illusion that you’re controlling the powerful Greek army.
And we have no clue what happened to the audio side of things either. While in skirmish mode things don’t sound terribly bad, with the tempo of the music changing depending on what you’re doing, things go downhill in the campaign mode. Voice acting isn’t too good, but passable. The sound effects need help and it was disgusting to hear that some of the game’s tracks were looped. It was laughable in fact, but somewhat scary too. It’s amazing that a game could have levels where the soundtrack would repeat every twenty-or-so seconds, and even had a pause between loops.
We can’t put our finger on it, but Rise & Fall: Civilizations at War just isn’t that fun. Despite having some fantastic features, it’s confusing to see so many games repeat the same mistake over and over again. Poor AI is a curse for RTS games, and Rise & Fall doesn’t do much to avoid this. It’s disappointing that such a fantastic concept falls flat on its stomach due to some minor, but unforgiving, mistakes.
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