Rise & Fall: Civilizations at War
June 22,2006 -

Some great ideas are better left on paper than putting into practice, and Rise and Fall: Civilizations at War may be one of the more prominent examples of a fantastic notion brought to mediocre life. It’s not the first game to combine elements of strategy and action titles together, but it’s the first to attempt it in such a thorough and ambitious fashion. Rise & Fall is an RTS in which you can jump into your hero’s shoes and play it like an action game. It sounds fun and intriguing; in practice, it’s an utter mess.

There are two campaigns in Civilizations at War: Alexander and Cleopatra. In an ironic twist for a game that lets you get up close and personal with your hero, the story mode is the weakest aspect. You will encounter a good variety of recognizable historical figures, but the game is too enamored with its own innovation to spend much time joining together the pieces of its rambling story. The cutscenes are the most egregious example of this incoherence: they are simply ugly. Badly-rendered cinematic scenes with weird camera angles and laughable animations are not a good way to encourage player immersion.

Rise and Fall is at its best when it works like a standard real-time strategy game. It isn’t replete with new ideas, but like Stainless Studios’ Empire Earth, these portions are slow and methodical. Your slaves gather wood and gold for resources, while you also accumulate another resource: glory. You earn glory by succeeding in combat, and spend it on hero advisors and levels, which take the place of the more familiar system of advancing to new eras. Most battles involve building up resources, and then amassing a larger army than your opponent and throwing it into combat.

Naval warfare is the game’s strength, thanks to a few original touches that we’d like to see implemented in other RTS’s. First is the grapple, which you can use to attach your ships to enemy vessels and board them. This wouldn’t work as well as it does, however, without the other chief innovation of the naval battles: rather than being undersized units in which your troops disappear while occupying them, they are reproduced to scale and will hold as many troops as you can fit. While sailing, your units can attack foes just as they can on any other part of the map, and there’s an undeniable thrill in taking your combatants to sea and taking over a Persian craft by force. The bloody, violent animations make these moments all the more satisfying.

There are some small problems within the strategy-oriented gameplay. Pathfinding is one of them, and it’s not uncommon to have units get stuck in the geometry and remain there for the duration of the mission. Another is the interface, which isn’t that complex but still takes up more than enough room on the screen. It’s also unresponsive to clicks sometimes, as if the tired engine is too busy to worry about your mouse. It’s also worth noting that unlike most modern strategy games, your slaves are included whenever you use the mouse to select units, so be careful, or you’ll be sending them into battle instead of off to the gold mine.

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