Films and Fiction

Trying to find good strategy games for the DS is hard. The touch screen design of the platform does appear to be a perfect pairing for some high-quality strategy, but there’s a serious shortage of strategy games of any kind, and good ones are even rarer.

Lego Battles is a nice, low-level game to play if you’re not looking for anything too difficult, and it gives a good sense of what a more challenging strategy game could look like for the DS.

On the face of it, History Great Empires: Rome looks like a promising game. City building and resource gathering, the ability to play large battles, tactics having a big role in warfare. It offers a lot on paper, but what does it actually deliver once it gets onto consoles?

To give a brief overview of what the game’s about, it’s a turn-based game, set in the Roman Empire, obviously, and you get to choose between a selection of different maps in places like Italy, Spain, and Britain. Although the main idea is to command Roman legions to victory, you can choose to play as different tribes and civillisations in the countries you’re fighting in. This gives you access to a range of different units, with Gladiators for the Romans, and Pictish war bands for the Celts, etc. Your choice of civillisation determines where you start on the map, then it’s time for war!

You start out with a certain amount of map under your control. This is determined by the reach of your settlements; to expand you need to invade your neighbours and capture their cities.

Expansion is the only real option, as victory depends upon having more settlements under your control than other players. There’s no option to build new settlements, just to capture your enemy’s. Settlements begin as villages and can be expanded to towns and cities, though they are still limited in size.

Settlements, Units, and Resources

Your settlements are really the centre of the game. You need them to build soldiers, gather resources, and defend your territory, and there’s quite a substantial list of buildings you’ll need.

Mines, farms, and lumber mills let you gather the three resources of iron, food, and wood, which you need to construct more buildings and units for your army. You start out with a few of these to get you going, and you can increase production by upgrading them as you progress.

Buildings like blacksmiths and fletchers let you build heavy infantry and archers, and you need other buildings to create new units, such as the Imperial Residence for Praetorians. You’re limited to how many troops you can build by the number of inhabitants in a given settlement, which increases as the settlement develops.

You can increase the size of your units by building small forts, barracks, and quartermasters, which let you upgrade your unit’s complement. Forts also provide squads to defend the settlement, so it’s always a better option to fight on home ground if your going up against a stronger enemy.

The types of units available are split into four main groups: light infantry, heavy infantry, cavalry, and ranged, with variations across the different civillisations. The Romans are easily the most powerful, with units such as Praetorians and Gladiators by far the strongest in the game.

To Battle

Now comes the real test: what’s it like to do battle in Rome? The short answer is, a huge anticlimax.

You’re either battling to defend or conquer a settlement, or else fighting against your enemy in the open. None of this makes any difference to the gameplay, or even the background to the battle.

You start by arranging all your units in your preferred formation, choosing thing like wedge formations or column advance, then you press play and let the computer work it out. That’s it. There’s no moving troops once the battle’s begun, even if you see a great way to exploit your enemy, you just have to sit and watch your army moving slowly across the battlefield. All battles take several minutes to finish, unless one side has a huge advantage, and it can get boring after a while, as there’s not much to watch and little difference between battles.

It’s clearly intentional by the developers, but it just slows the game down hugely, and there’s little difference in outcomes regardless of how you lay out your troops. As there’s nothing to do once the battles begun, it might as well be decided by the computer and give you your results immediately, or at least have the option to skip through it to the end.

There is a genuine difference between troops, with Gladiators being tough warriors who rarely run from battle, and Peasants being the worst equipped and most likely to rout.

Diplomacy

Diplomacy is so small it’s almost non-existent in Rome. You go to a screen which shows all the countries on the map, and you can choose to declare war, make peace, or form an alliance with them. For the latter two you can also offer resources as tribute to help seal the deal. Occasional an enemy will contact you with an offer of peace or an alliance, giving you the opportunity to demand tribute from them, and that’s it for diplomacy.

Other Considerations

Now come two really annoying points about Rome. First is the way in which campaigns are won. The object is to have either forty percent of all settlements under your control, or to be twice the size of your next biggest enemy. This means that there’s never the opportunity to conquer every settlement on the map, and that the game often ends just when you’ve built an impressive army and have massive resources available to move forward with your campaign.

The second, even more annoying point is the many glitches in the game that can cause it to freeze while playing. If you’re attacked too many times in a row, it can freeze. Sometimes it will do it for no reason, or you’ll save and exit, then return to find that your save data has been erased, often after playing the game for hours.

In summing up, then, is History Great Empires: Rome a terrible game? No. Not really. It’s not really even a bad game, it’s so underwhelming and lacklustre that it’s hard to hate it. Looking at the blurb, it seems like a good game, with plenty to keep you interested, but it isn’t. The most you’ll take from it is vague understanding of the names of Roman army units, but not much else.

There are a few minigames to play, including a sudoku that used Roman numerals instead of numbers, which is probably as entertaining as the game.

If you’re looking for some strategy on DS without any expectations, Rome might just satisfy for a few hours, but there’s not a lot to keep you coming back to it, and the constant freezing is frustrating. It’s a shame, really, as it does look promising, and some of the features are OK, and could even be good with a bit more work, but on balance, it all comes across as a bit of a disappointment.

Playing History Great Empires: Rome on DS

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