Rise and Fall: Civilizations at War - RTS mixed with RPG

Author's Rating:

Pros: Fun to play for a while

Cons: Fun wear off after a while

The Bottom Line: 
The bottom line is still playing the original Warcraft. :-)

Author's Review
Rise and Fall: Civilizations at War is a decent RTS (real-time strategy) game with an aspect of a RPG (role-playing game) that make this an interesting game to play. However, its standing as an active game in my computer may be short lived as I am already getting to where it is not much of a challenge to play against the AI teams. This game is probably best played online with at least three other players.

In single player you can play one of two campaigns or play against the computer on a choice of single maps. The campaigns follow the history of Alexander the Great from Greece and Cleopatra from Egypt. As you play, the characters’ stories are played out and their empires are created.

The game is fun to play (especially with other people), but after you beat the campaigns there isn’t much left except for multiplayer. It took me a week to finish the first campaign and less than that to finish the second. Playing against the computer is only challenging at the hardest levels of difficulty and then only of you pit yourself against two or more AI players. It is still fun to play, but I have to wonder when my fascination will wear out with this game; probably not too much longer.


Rise and Fall

The game is based on past civilizations which include Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Persian. Basic game play is similar to Age of Empires and other games in that genre, but Rise and Fall also gives a unique twist to this format by allowing you to directly control your Hero. If you play the Greeks, you can take control of Alexander and fight right along side your men on the battle field with special fighting abilities and command abilities to aid your army.

Battles can be enormous and I have seen up to 8,000 troops on screen at once. This means you will need a good video card and a lot of memory to play this game without lag and glitch.

War takes place on land and on the sea. You can build galleys and biremes, which can train soldiers while on the sea, and triremes with ketepeltes (catapults) that can attack from off shore to clear a beach for landing troops. Naval battles are pretty impressive, much more so than other games of this type that I have played before.


Heros

Each civilization has Heroes that can be trained and once they are on the field, they can gain levels according to the amount of glory your civilization achieves. Glory can be achieved by exploring the map, building new buildings and killing enemies. You can also build glory statues that accumulate glory over time; the more statues you build, the faster you accumulate glory.

You can control your hero directly in “hero mode” but only for a short period of time. The higher your hero’s level, the longer he can remain in hero mode. You hero’s condition is measured by two meters; life and stamina. When your hero’s stamina gets too low, you can no longer use hero mode until it is regained. Your hero can not die, but he can fall in battle if his life meter reaches zero. If this happens he is respawned back your town center after a short time.

The heroes I have played so far are Alexander the Great, Cleopatra, and Julius Caesar. There are about four more but I have not played them yet. I believe each civilization has two heroes you can play in multiplayer and against the computer. In the campaigns you can only play Alexander and Cleopatra.


Controls

The game controls are mostly point and click, similar to Age of Empires. However, in hero mode you control your hero directly using the standard W-A-S-D for movement and left mouse click to attack. Depending on your hero, you may have two different weapons, like a bow and a sword. You can switch between weapons by using the "1" and "2" keys. Pressing "F" on the keyboard will tell your nearby troops to follow you when you are in hero mode.


Construction and buildings

You can build buildings with your citizens. Citizens are the equivalent of villagers in Age of Empires except that they can attack and defend your town if necessary. Citizens can gather resources of gold and wood which are needed to build buildings and to train soldiers. Several citizens can be assigned to any task, such as building, which speeds up the construction or increases the rate you acquire resources.

Buildings are needed to advance your civilization. You need a barracks to train foot soldiers and archers and you need a stable to train cavalry units. You can also build walls and towers for defense. Houses are not needed nor are they available to build, I guess the citizens sleep under trees? Who knows but houses are not part of the game (unless you capture some that are already standing next to an outpost.

Outposts
Outposts are single tower structures that can be captured and used as defensive positions of forward battle fronts. Once captured, they automatically house several units garrisoned for defense called “Home Guard”. These units can not be commanded but will faithfully defend the outpost.

Siege

You can have your citizens research siege engines such as ballistae, siege towers and battering rams. These are necessary to break through enemy walls and gates. If you are defending against a siege, you can place ladders on the inside of your walls and place archers on top to rain arrows down on the attackers.

You can also train special units called ladder teams at your barracks. These units serve a single purpose, they place a ladder on the outside of enemy walls so your phalanx and other foot units can scale the walls and deal with enemy archers on a personal level.

Triremes with ketepeltes can also barrage enemy towers and walls from shore if close enough. I have found that a well loaded trireme with archers and a ketepelte is a devastating force that can not be attacked except by another ship or ballistae and archers from shore. Triremes have another attack as well; you can ram another ship in its side if positioned right and sink it on impact. After you sink a ship, your archers can shoot the men in the water before they reach the shore.


Graphics

Graphics are good, not great but decent. When fighting in hero mode they are slightly better. The screen can be rotated and tilted to a degree, but I would have preferred to be able to zoom out more to get a larger view of the map.

As far as the 3D effects, they are pretty good but nothing extraordinary. The fact that you can have thousands of soldiers on the screen at once does speak highly of the graphics team behind the game. Unless you have a pretty powerful graphics card and at least a gigabyte of memory in your computer, you will probably have some bad glitching and lag during big battles.

Water effects are pretty good for what they game requires, but again; nothing astounding. In hero mode, you may find yourself swimming on occasion and the water does look much better in hero mode, but then so does everything else.


Sound

The first thing I did was turn off the music. It isn’t bad but I don’t care for constant midi instrumentation while I play the game. The sounds of battle are decent (as most all aspects of the game are), but again nothing stands out as spectacular. When you are near the sea or viewing the sea, you can hear the sounds of the ocean and creaking of the nearby ships. Sound is done tastefully and used well but the sounds are slightly repetitious and after w while you may not even notice them anymore as you get accustomed to hearing them.


System Requirements

* PC with Windows XP/2000
* Processor: Pentium 4 1.5GHz or AMD 2000+ or greater
* RAM: 512MB
* Graphics chip: Radeon 9500 or better, NVIDIA Geforce 3 or better (MX series is not supported)
* Graphics memory: 64MB or more
* DirectX 9.0c compliant sound card
* 3GB free disk space
* 16X DVDROM drive (for DVDROM version)
* 4X CDROM drive (for CDROM version)

Recommended

* PC with Windows XP/SP2
* Processor: Pentium 4 2.4GHz w/HT, equivalent or better
* RAM: 1GB
* Graphics chip: Radeon X800 or better, NVIDIA FX5900 or better
* Graphics memory: 256MB


Conclusion

This is a fun game to play with other people, but it gets old in single player mode rather quickly. If you like to play RTS games online, this may be a good buy for you to play with others. If you like RPGs, then this leaves a little to be desired in that category. For the price I paid for the game ($24.99) I feel I got my money’s worth. I do think it will probably be on my shelf for good in another week or two though.

Thanks for reading,
Gr8ful :-)