Vendor's Description
Rise of Nations is a new historical real-time strategy game from Big Huge Games' Brian Reynolds, designer of the PC game classic Civilization II. For the first time ever, gamers will experience the pulse-pounding thrill and speed of real-time gaming combined with the epic scope and depth of turn-based strategy games. The game brings to life 6,000 years of history, from the ancient age to the information age - not just in warfare but in city building, trade and diplomacy.

Rise of Nations allows players to create new cities, improve their city infrastructure and expand national borders. Players have the option to win through military or quasi military strategies, using everything from slingshots to cannons to nuclear missiles. Despite the long timeline in the game, Rise of Nations is designed with the casual audience in mind, meaning gamers will be able to move through the game quickly without playing for hours.

Setup
Rise of Nations (RoN) installed very easily. After running the installation wizard, I started up a game immediately. Rise of Nations comes with a "learning" scenario that teaches you some of the different aspects of the game before you jump into serious battles. I was up and playing my first real game in no time.

Game Play
RoN sports some really nice graphics and sounds, and very addictive game play. In short, it is like a cross between Risk, Civilization, and Age of Empires. The standard game starts off with a map of the world, with territories charted out (just like in the board game Risk). You choose your starting nation, and then began your campaign to conquer the world. However, instead of the dice controlling the outcome of battling neigboring nations, each time you challenge a nation, the screen changes to a close-up of the land you are battling for (or defending), and you begin what feels like is an entirely different game. Your focus is no longer on the big world map, but on building cities, managing resources, building up armies, advancing technologies, and finally engaging the enemy in battle. Here, the game has more of a Age of Empires and Civilization feel as you create farms to gain food, build mines next to hills and mountains, create trade routes, and gather wood. In many ways, RoN removes some of the mundane tasks of the other mentioned games making it a lot more fun. For instance, instead of having to replant farms as required in Age of Empires, once a farm is planted in RoN, you never have to worry about replanting it (unless, of course, it's destroyed by your enemy). Likewise, instead of having to build roads in a turn-by-turn fashion in Civilizatoin, in RoN your cities automatically build roads as you build new buildings, cities, and trade routes. RoN is real-time, which is far more exciting than the turn-based game play implemented in Civilization.

As you would expect, different buildings require different resources to construct, and can then produce other resources once built. Granaries help food output, mills help wood output, universities help technology growth, and so on. As you advance in technology, you advance in the skills and abilities of your artillary and soldiers. You start off with rocks and spears, advance to guns and horses, and eventually reach a period where you have tanks, fighters, submarines, and missiles. You can create spies to sabotage enemies buildings, generals to organize and improve the defenses of your armies, and so much more. Another way to describe this game is Civilization on steroids. It's a total blast, both in terms of balancing resources, managing your cities, and strategizing your battle plans. The best part, of course, is the implementation of your battle plans. Eventually, you conquer the enemies capital city, and that ends the game... well, sort of. Then you're reminded that it was only a game within a game, and you are brought, once again, to the world map.

Back on the world map, successful campaigns win you the territory as well as other goodies. Each territory has a set of icons indicating what kind of goodies you get if you conquer the territory. Sometimes you get an extra army, sometimes a special abilities card (that can be activated in subsequent battles), rare resources, a wonder of the world, or, if the territory carried a flag, then you've just eliminated an entire civilization from the game. The object of the world conquer game is to dominate the world, so going after the nations with flags is a good thing.

With each nation battle launching a new game, you can imagine that the world conquer can take quite awhile to complete. I played several world conquer matches, and they all lasted for days. Strategy techniques aside, another technique you really need to get a handle on is managing your time (otherwise, you'll be up late, night after night, losing lots of sleep). Tell yourself when to stop, and actually stop when you reach that point (easier said than down).

The aesthetics of the game were very pleasing, adding quite a bit to the game play. The graphics of the buildings, citizens, armies, and scenery were very well done, and the sound effects and music were awesome.

One thing I did miss were the campaigns of Age of Empires. With RoN, you can engage in single battles, or even battles over the internet, but there were no real campaigns with background stories and missions to achieve. All of the battles basically have you doing the same thing each time... build cities, build resources, build armies, and conquer. Of course, for battle strategists, there are an infinite number of ways to strategize and conquer.

There was also one negative that RoN shared in common with its Age of Empires cousin, and that is the way the AI advanced in difficulty. While we hope to see the computer get smarter, what we get is just the computer getting faster. In other words, while you have to manually click each of your cities to manage them, and manually tell each building, citizen and army what to do, the computer, with it's CPU power, can manage everything so quickly that it appears to do it simultaneously. What that means is that while you are proud of finally getting your first army formed, you discover that the computer has an army 10 times that size already advancing on you. It would be nice to one day see a game like this have the AI restricted to human limitations in its ability to manage resources, but get fiercely more intelligent in the way that it strategizes and implements its battle plans.

Summary
Rise of Nations takes one step beyond the strategy games of the past, and brings us a new and refreshing strategy game of city management, civilization management, and world conquer. If you enjoy the board game Risk, you'll love the world conquer aspect of this game. If you enjoy Civilization, then get ready to pump up the adrenaline as Rise of Nations takes your civilizatoin to real-time rather than turn-based. For those Age of Empire addicts out there, this game provides similar addictive game play, but without many of the tedious resource management tasks. Regardless of whether you've played these other games or not, Rise of Nations will captivate your imagination and intellect for hours at a time, immersing you in an exciting and fun world of real-time challenge. It's unfortunate that the game is not available for our Mac friends and family.

Pros

• Addictive game play
• Excellent integration of Risk style game with real-time strategy challenges
• Great sound effects and graphics
• Free internet gameplay

Cons

• AI relies too much on resource gathering rather than strategy
• Challenge ratio between easy and hard not well balanced
• No Mac version

Overall Rating:

4 1/2 out of 5 Mice