- Reviewed for: Windows PC
- The Good: Large maps, lots of strategy involved, neat features like spell-casting druids to heal your armies and suck the life force of the enemy.
- The Bad: Interface has some frustrating limitations that require far more mouse clicks than should be necessary.
- The Verdict: An interesting and good-looking strategy game offering two types of game play - which equals hours of action to keep you busy.
REVIEW:
The world is awash in role playing games, but Celtic Kings: Rage of War from Haemimont Games is a sharp-looking title with some interesting new twists that go beyond hack-and-slash adventure.
The game has two modes, Adventure and Strategy. In Adventure, you take on the role of the warrior Larax. In the intro movie, he heads off to war and his wife gets killed when the enemy sacks his village. In a rage, Larax gives himself over to the goddess of war Kathubodua in return for some kick-ass battle skills.
That's where you come in. From there on, you guide Larax as he explores the countryside and visits towns and forts, recruiting allies and smiting the baddies. In short, it's very Diablo-like. To add some spice to the game, there's a war going on between the Romans and Gauls, and your decision about who to lend your support to will affect the outcome of the game.
Adventure mode is fun, but can be quite difficult, especially early in the game when you have few resources and allies. A word of advice: Save often.
I preferred the second mode, Strategy. This style of play is more like Command & Conquer or Dune II. You start off with a basic little village, and your goal is to build an empire and wipe out all opposition. Your peasants grow food and produce gold, which you use to feed and equip your armies. You capture more villages and fortresses to expand your territory, and you spend the gold to add more fighters and upgrade the equipment and training of your armies. There are also Roman and Gaul villages that offer different types of fighters, from mounted spearmen and Amazon warriors, to Roman legionnaires.
There are some interesting twists, though, as I mentioned. First, there are caves scattered around the countryside that can help you get the drop on an enemy - enter one, go underground to get past an opponent's ring of fortresses, and pop up inside the perimeter of their defenses where they least expect it. Nasty.
And as well as fighters and working peasants, Haemimont has thrown in a Celtic staple: Druids. As well as buying armies, you can fund druids who heal your troops. But a more interesting feature is the ability to sends groups of druids to one of the "Stonehenges" scattered throughout each game board, where they can call on mystic powers to help your cause. For example, with enough druids, you can have them do a ceremony that gradually saps the health of your enemy. The enemy has to find the druids and kill them off to stop them.
In Strategy mode, you also have to be very protective of your villages and peasants. You need steady population growth so that you'll have people to train as warriors. And the food supply from the villages to your forts is crucial - without food, your expensive fighters eventually die of starvation.
The game is fairly complex and takes a bit of learning, which is fine for hard-core strategy gamers, but the controls can be frustrating. For example, you can send mules with loads of food from one fort to supply another, but rather than just punching in a number of food units and sending it on its way, you have to load each individual mule with a small amount of food and tell it where to take the shipment. This requires a lot of repetitive mouse clicks for large shipments, which you'll need regularly later in the game to balance out your supplies. It's especially annoying to be slowed down by the interface when you have to manage many, many forts and villages while fighting real-time battles, defending castles and exploring the countryside.
And rather than just telling a stronghold to keep producing a certain type of fighter as long as resources and manpower is available, you can only "order" a certain number of warriors to be trained at a time, so you keep checking back with each of your villages to refill the training queue and keep the supply of fighters coming. And the type of fighter you can order depends on how far you've upgraded the buildings in your village, but the graphics don't change as the building's capabilities expand. Some visual cues to show at a glance which are your advanced buildings and which need upgrading would have made things easier when you start managing a lot of villages.
The maps themselves can be huge, too, with up to 5,000 units on each one at a time. I ran into a problem, though, as the game progressed and the number of warriors involved in the game grew. I ran the game on two middle-of-the-road machines - a Pentium III 733 MHz machine with 512MB of RAM running Windows XP, and a Celeron 1 GHz PC with 256MB of RAM running Windows ME - and the initial load times were within a minute on both. But when there were a lot of units on-screen, a couple of times an hour I would get sudden freezes where nothing would happen for as much as 30 seconds, then the game would clear and play normally again.
The graphics are excellent and very detailed, with support for resolutions up to 1,280 by 1,024. There's also support for LAN or Internet games with up to eight players, and a scenario editor to create your own confrontations.
Despite the odd freeze-up and frustrations over the limitations of the interface, this game still kept me hooked for a couple of weeks, playing into the wee hours in Strategy mode. It's the kind of game that gets under your skin, and you just have to keep going until you win. If you like role-playing battle games, this one will keep you busy for a long time.