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• Reviewed on: Windows XP
• Also available for: Windows 98 through Windows XP Professional
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• The Good: Excellent graphics; stable game engine; enormous variety of weapons and units; blends the best elements of a number of tried-and-true real-time-strategy hits.
• The Bad: AI is far too simple even for beginners on the easy setting; some ultra-powerful weapons are far too easy to get, unbalancing the game.
• The Verdict: A real-time strategy game with elements we've all seen before, but it's well done and reminds me a lot of the board game "Risk" with more in-battle control, which earns it big points in my book.
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  REVIEW:

Walk into any video game store and you'll be up to your ears in real-time strategy games. But every now and then something new such as Microsoft's Rise of Nations stands out from all the run-of-the-mill titles.

The company isn't breaking much new ground here, though. We've seen most of the elements of this game before, scattered across real-time strategy games (RTSs) set in various time periods. In fact, much of Rise of Nations is a rehash of successful Microsoft titles like Age of Empires and Age of Mythology, but it's just so well done that it doesn't seem stale.

Microsoft's game division has produce more than it's share of barely playable, over-produced, bloated monstrosities in the past couple of years, but Rise of Nations escaped this unfortunate fate. Its engine is smooth as silk, the interface is clean and easy to master and the graphics are great.

The game starts in the dark ages, and you choose one of 18 nations to control — ranging from the British or Koreans to the Mayans or the Spanish. In standard RTS fasion, you start with an army of relatively unskilled swordsmen and knights, with peasants to do the heavy lifting. You gradually build up your cities, harvest resources and research new technologies as you work away at wiping out enemy nations (so that you can claim their land and resources).

The part I really liked about Microsoft's Rise of Nations was that it plays a lot like my favourite board game, Risk. The main screen looks a lot like the Risk map, and you choose where to place your armies for attack and defensive purposes. At the end of each turn, the armies can move to one adjacent country if you're not happy with where you've placed them (or your empire's borders need fortifying somewhere else), and when you take countries you are awarded additional armies and special cards.

These cards are like the ones in Risk that can be cashed in for armies, except they can be played in singles. Each card has certain properties that are bestowed on you for the turn during which they are played. They include things like being able to research new technology faster, starting with greater resources than normal, being able to see more of the map before areas are actually explored, and so on.

When you attack a country, that's when things get interesting. You zoom in on a section of the map and take control of individual units (chosen from a selection of more than 200 building- and fighting-units). A battle for a single country can take ages, and you can actually move through whole periods of world history during a single battle, starting out with primitive weapons and moving up to technology like that seen on today's modern battlefield. You build facilities to harvest food, wood, metal and oil, and factories to make military units ranging from spearmen to heavy tanks depending on where you are in history during the battle. You create trade routes between cities to increase your wealth, and build ports and ships to rule the seas.

Most scenarios take about an hour to play, but there's a lot of repetition for each country you invade or defend. This is a really annoying part of the game — every time you start a new battle, you start researching from scratch again. You have to re-learn all the techniques for gathering resources, building metal weapons, and so on. It gets a bit repetitious, but the saving grace is that as the game goes on, history progresses. That means a basic weapon in medieval times is an archer, whereas a basic weapon in modern times is a special forces unit — it at least throws a new graphical face on the same boring process.

Another problem I had with the game was that some of the weaponry and scientific advancement is unbalanced. You can sometimes research so much more quickly (or slowly) than the enemy that some battles end up with fighters with crossbows or muskets up against your military's machine guns and flamethrowers, and knights on horseback riding against truck-pulled field artillery.

In other cases, the weapons themselves are unbalanced even when the combatants have advanced to the same technological age. A submarine, for example, can sink almost anything faster than the enemy ships can retaliate. I built a group of three subs in one scenario and sank an entire enemy fleet of a couple of dozen vessels without ever suffering a scratch. In another scenario, I built nuclear missiles and atomized all the enemy's major cities and there was nothing they could do to defend against it (by the way, don't get your own forces too close to ground zero — I mistakenly nuked a city while a division of tanks was a bit too close by, and my expensive armour was obliterated along with the enemy).

One nice touch, though, is that once you upgrade a certain technology, all the existing units using that technology are instantly upgraded. This reduces the level of micromanagement and mouse clicks.

The AI is quite good at helping to streamline the game in other areas, too. Units can be ordered to travel from one end of the map to another, and they won't wander blindly and get stuck against the side of a mountain or out on a peninsula, for example, which was a problem with many older RTSs. And when you research "tactics," your units will automatically start to fight in efficient formations instead of simply rushing the enemy en masse.

The troops are smart, too - if you leave them alone while you go off to manage something else on a different section of the map, they'll defend themselves if attacked rather than waiting to be picked off one by one, and they'll even take the initiative. For example, if they follow a fleeing former attacker back to an enemy city, they'll start trying to take it over automatically in a co-ordinated attack.

In other ways, the AI can also be quite stupid. In the aforementioned nuclear scenario, the enemy had the same nuclear capability I did but never used it. One well-placed nuke in my main city would have wiped out my industrial capability, but the computer never decided to do the obvious. In fact, the AI's overall battle tactics are so basic that most beginners might want to start on the medium setting — easy just isn't a challenge, even for newcomers.

And if the AI still isn't tough enough for you even on the higher difficulty settings, you can play against up to eight human opponents on-line or on a LAN (who will tend to be much less forgiving …).

The game has a good variety of possible winning strategies. Instead of relying purely on military might, you can use spies to steal technology and get a leg up on the enemy. You can also bribe enemies to delay their attacks until you've built up your strength. You can hit hard at the beginning of a scenario to undermine an opponent before they get going, or gradually build up a swarm of military units and unleash it in a wave on enemy cities.

The graphics are stellar, too. Zooming in reveals details as small as tables set for dinner on outdoor patios, and tiny bows and arrows held by your archers. As you dispatch enemy units, infantry crumple slowly to the ground while tanks explode spectacularly.

The environments are fairly spartan, though, with basic clumps of trees for timber, small hills to be mined, and expanses of water. As history progresses buildings do become more detailed as they are modernized, though, and even the road system improves.

Despite the great graphics, load times are fast. The game can be loaded and started within a minute or so, and re-loading levels takes seconds. You can also save from any point inside a level, rather than being forced to play out a scenario in one sitting.

The game interface is clean and easy to manage, and there's virtually no learning to do. But if you don't feel comfortable starting a game cold, there's an informative series of tutorials to get you up to speed.

Rise of Nations is basically a rehash of the great board game Risk, along with some of the best elements from the top RTSs of all time. But that's not a bad thing. It might be a shameless rip-off in many ways, but the innovation is in the masterful blending of all these things we've seen before to make something that's fresh, easy to play and entertaining. Once you get past the déjà vu, this game's a blast.