Rise and Fall: Game styles at war.

Author's Rating:

Pros: Graphics, size of gameplay, naval combat.

Cons: Little replay value, repetitive sounds, only two campaigns.

The Bottom Line: 
An interesting attempt to enliven RTS with a first-person perspective.  While the replay value of the game is limited, the epic grandeur, graphics and naval combat shine.

Author's Review
Rise and Fall: Civilizations at War
Midway
2006

At first glance, one might easily dismiss Rise and Fall: Civilizations at War (R&F:CaW) as another run of the mill real-time-strategy games of the era.  Certainly the market was (and still is) flooded with entire series of them, Age of Empires, Age of Mythology, Total War, Star Wars Empire at War just to name a few.  There are many aspects of the gameplay identical to all of these.  However, RTS games of late have tried to come up with a unique twist to the gameplay all on their own.  For example, in Age of Mythology, you are able to call upon "God Powers" which inflict battle altering affects on the situation. 

In R&F:CaW, however, the game's superpower is quite literally, yourself.  The developers pinned the entire success of the game on the ability to temporarily take command of your civilization's chosen "hero", which transforms the gameplay from traditional birds-eye RTS combat where you dictate units to go - into an over the shoulder, first-person shooter type camera view where you command your hero and hack and slash your way through the enemy.  Careful utilization of your specific hero's abilities and understanding of his/her limitations will give you the ability to dramatically and decisively alter the course of a battle.  This will allow you to repell a coordinated attack, or make your own offensive more likely to succeed.  It is likely this aspect of the game that will likely inspire you to play, or turn you off from the game completely.

Setting

The ancient civilizations at war are the Greeks, Romans, Persians, and Egyptians.  The game is not really a history lesson, as heroes and units not from the same centuries and eras are all canoodling together here.  Each civilization has its own beautifully rendered units,  buildings, and art design.  While each civilization's core units are nearly identical in use - a basic swordsman, spearman, ranged unit, and mounted unit are common for all the civilizations, each culture has access to several unique units, such as the Greek Spartan or the Egyptian Healer.  Each civilization has a choice of two heroes from which, you may select one to play as.  Also, each civilization has different seige weapons that they have access to.

Resources and Heroes

Like any RTS, there are resources that must be collected to build your forces and advance.  The resource collecting aspect of the game is relatively straightforward, without the constant need to micromanage it.  Citizens, in addition to building things, need only collect 2 basic resources - wood and gold.  The third resource, is a special resource, called "glory" which is used to level up your hero and other advancements.  Leveling up your hero grants you the ability to improve the quality of your units, gives you access to your special units, and thirdly provides the ability to call upon "advisers".  These advisers essentially function the same way as researching technologies in other similar games.  Each civilization has slightly different variations and nuances in what I call their "adviser tree".  Learning the best path to get them all will make your use of glory most efficient.

Glory is earned in many ways - though the construction of buildings (especially glory statues), exploration of the map, and most readily by combat (both killing enemies and receiving casualties will earn you glory).  Glory is also used to advance your hero to the next level - which unlocks another tier of advisers, and also unlocks the ability to spend glory to upgrade your units, which is extremely necessary.

Your hero is trained in a town square - once you commit to one hero over the other you cannot go back.  Once properly leveled, your hero has both a constitution meter (hit points) and a stamina meter.  Stamina represents how long you can control your hero in hero mode, using the familiar role playing game WASD keys.  Every hero has their own stamina level, rate of recovery, speed on the battlefield, in addition to a melee attack and a ranged attack - albeit with varying degrees of strength for each.  Each hero also has special abilities - as Achilles you can release a battle cry that temporarily makes the troops near you invincible, while as Cleopatra, you can make some enemy troops defect to your side.  Cleopatra is also the best archer, with not one but 3 different bow attacks, however her stamina is quickly used if you change to a melee attack.

Navies

Your civilization can also build navies if your map has water.  Each civilization can build galleys, which can be upgraded to biremes and then triremes - the ultimate ancient battleship.  These ships, even galleys, are massive.  Fully researched, they serve a variety of uses including troop transports, mobile archer and siege weapon platforms for harassing enemy coasts, and can attack other ships with a battering ram (when well timed) and they can even grapple other ships and attempt to board and capture them.  In addition, when your ships are "beached" they act as barracks, allowing you to train and deploy troops to mimic an epic beach invasion.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

R&F: CaW is one of the few RTS games where the size, complexity and scope of certain things in the ancient world are properly rendered.  Walls are HUGE, and being able to walk and deploy troops on them is very realistic.  The terrain and elevation of the land give archers and units on high ground a bonus to strength or range depending on the unit, as does placing archers on walls and towers.  Equally impressive is the naval combat.  The ships are truly massive and the first time I boarded and captured an enemy ship with my own troops was quite thrilling.  Equally fun is placing your hero on a ship, sailing close and using hero mode to take out entire encampments or entire legions on enemy ships using your hero's bow attack.  Naval power is balanced with risk, however - just like in the ancient world, if your ship is destroyed, chances are you won't have any survivors.  Heroes can use stamina to make it to land, but very few sailors ever make it to shore!

The siege-craft of the game is also very realistic.  Workers can construct catapults, siege rams, balistae, even siege towers, which allow you to attempt to board enemy walls are large, complicated, and take a while for your workers to build.

The units truly interact with each other the way they should.  It really is necessary to have some of every type, because they seem to counter each other more effectively than in some games, where it seems like you can just play with your favorite units.  In this game, you must have at least a small company of cavalry to take out some archers - or a siege weapon.  And you must have spearmen to counter enemy cavalry.  And so on...

The civilizations have their own play styles to a degree.  The Greeks are a fairly balanced civilization, and their two heroes, Alexander and Achilles are among the best in the game.  Their armies are small, just like in history, but can train pedagogues to constantly train and compensate.  One of their special units, the Spartan infantry, can tango with Roman infantry and live to tell about it, but they are quite slow.

The Egyptians are best played with finesse.  Cleopatra is the best archer in the game.  Egypts units generally lack the endurance of other civilizations, but are quick, and their special unit of the Healer Priests allows them to last longer, and once fully upgraded - to even raise fallen units to fight again.  The Egyptians, however, truly shine on wide, open battlefields with which they can use their incredible chariot archers to brutal effectiveness.  Each chariot can "train" to have 4 archers in its car and when fully upgraded can launch arrows which ignite their enemies in flames.  They also have access to war elephants, good at trampling enemy infantry (and trees, by the way, allowing them to attack by going through the woods), partly compensating for their weak swordsmen.  Egypt also has an economic advantage, mining gold faster than the others, and their advisers have many economic boosts.

The Persians are characterized by large armies with lower cost troops, symbolizing their status as the ancient superpower of the game.  Further echoing this, their Stables automatically train horse archers once built, up to eight per stable.  Their heroes, Sargon II and Nebuchadnezzar are swift and able archers, but suffer low constitution and stamina otherwise.  You must also designate a formation to be your "Immortals" which will have a bonus to strength.  Immortals cannot truly "die", once the formation falls, you simply designate another to take its place.  The Persians also have access to an elephant archer and the gruesome scythe chariot, which quickly and mercilessly shreds enemy infantry and especially enemy archers unable to get out of its way.  Persia also has certain economic advantages, including the fastest wood gathering rate.

The Romans have their strengths in siege craft, and the ability to generate tax faster than the rest.  Their heroes, Germanicus and Julius Caesar, are relatively tough but slower on foot, and Julius has a special ability to call upon a barage of catapult fire in his vicinity, quickly decimating any units and buildings.  Their infantry is the strongest of the game, and their special units consist of a modified catapult, effective at injuring many troops at a time, and gladiators.  Gladiators are automatically trained at a colliseum and their ability is an "instant kill" on severely injured enemy units - like the ones hit by their siege weapons.

The battles are excellently rendered with a lot of attention to little details that make the game visually sparkle.  Units and soldiers stumble and fall as they are injured, allowing enemies to get further blows in.  Soldiers fly through the air as boulders from catapults rip apart towers and smash into troop formations.  Archers plummet to their deaths from high on walls and towers.  Buildings and walls show visible damage until they crumble, taking any troops on or in them.  Units burst into flames from enemy fire, units scream and panic while they drown in the sea.  Ships splinter and teeter from side to side from collisions and hits from projectiles, water splashes and ripples around.  Your army cheers and celebrates when a battle is won or when your hero returns from having "fallen".

The music is appropriately grand and larger than life, and the tracks are long enough where it doesn't get too repetitive.  There is different music for times when you are under attack, and good fanfares for achievements.  The sounds however can get a bit tedious, especially the shouts from your soldiers like "Remember Thermopylae!" and "Death to the demons!" as they battle.

The game has exactly two campaigns, a larger one that loosely follows Alexander's story and a shorter one that rewrites Cleopatra's.  There are a few chapters of the campaign that are entirely done in hero mode.  I found those entirely frustrating as you have a limited amount of stamina that can only be replenished by finding specific jars along the way. Other than that, there aren't any smaller scenarios.  There is multiplayer (which I have not played) and then there is a scenario generator.  I found the choices of maps to be rather forced and deliberate, but once you've exhausted the campaigns, this is all there is.

Even though it may not be a game you come back to often once you've mastered it, it is still worthy of your attention.  You can download and play the full game (without multiplayer ability, I think) from http://www.gamershell.com/download_33916.shtml.

Happy gaming.

The Premier
Epinions - November 2010

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