27 May 2005 16:23 pm
If you were a huge fan of Blizzard Entertainment’s Warcraft series and you were looking to play a similar game just not as good then Armies of Exigo is the way to go. Actually that is quite a harse way to begin a review after all the graphics are great. But still, you have to wonder.
The storyline behind the game is this – there is a nice world call Noran where humans and Elves live and they all just chill and lay around smiling. Then the place is invaded by some kind of hell beasts. The fallen, who are a third race in the game are sort of bolted on too to give the game a bit more depth.
You play through the stories of the game in a series of 36 missions shared out between the three races. How original. Original is actually a key word as the game has a feel to it that is similar to the feel that the original strategy games did – years and years ago.
Remember the Zerg from Starcraft? Well they are back only this time they are going under the name of the Fallen for copyright reasons. The features are remarkably similar though such as having to lay down goo and having cloned looking insect units. I mean, ok you can be inspired by concepts but this is a bit silly.
As for the other armies they are the classic stock characters you expect from a fantasy game. These are pretty much open source as Games Workshop’s Warhammer has constantly demonstrated so no problems here. The armies differences are no much beyond skin deep however.
The resource system is split into three sections, gold, wood and gems which you send workers off to bring back to construct buildings, units, technology, etc. Hopefully you will like this part of the game as there is a lot of it. Amries of Exigo is by no means a game that is going anywhere fast.
The balance of the game is also less than centre. There is always a fine line between having defences an enemy can walk over and having defences that cannot be beaten. Armies of Exigo got it wrong – the defences are killer. Nobody can get past them and thanks to the units limit you can’t send huge armies to take them down.
Remember in Age of Empires II (and the rest really) when your units would run off on one man quests to kill someone and would not return for 5 hours? Well the same thing happens in Armies of Exigo except the game seems to be lacking the option to have your units act defensively as Age of Empires did. There is hold but this isn’t particularly good for attacking if your men are hand to hand fighters.
As if that didn’t make your units hard enough to control they refuse to form any kind of formation and are quite happy to leave long range attack units at the front while your hand to hand units skulk at the back. So unless you can slow down time you just don’t have long enough to sort every single unit out into the right place and the result to your army can be less than pleasing.
Armies of Exigo does feature a “duel-layer” system which basically means you have a top level and an underground level. The first thing that comes to mind is the hassle of switching between the two. With good reason as this is a hassle. It is quite a good concept though and does add something extra to the game.
The game’s AI is about as intelligent as a stone. That said, many games have AI that are this dumb. Still in a real time strategy you want at least fairly intelligent AI not just one that will throw the same units at you over and over again. Once again it is like a bad version of Ages of Empires.
The game features a nice multiplayer option where you can have up to eight players battling it out in quite a wide selection of different games. There is an online browser too to make it really simple to find who else is online. The only real criticism here though is that nobody else seems to play it.
The game somewhat redeems itself in the graphics department though. The game looks excellent and the cut scenes look even better than that. It is sometimes worth casting a spell just to sit back and take in the views as the well detailed unit sprays it out across the battle field.
Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the audio. While the ambient sound effects are passable the video talent varies wildly and you can play through most the game without even noticing the music. It is a shame really as the game could have scored seriously high marks if aesthetics if the audio was better.
Overall, Black Hole has come up with a nice looking game. Sadly however the gameplay isn’t there to back it up. Though I have put the game down a lot in the review it isn’t really a bad game. It’s just that it is no different from anything else out there and there is a lot better available.
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