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Some of you reading this probably know I wrote the Alexander movie review. I decided to write this review also because some of you might be interested in the game since the movie was such a dissapointment and complete theatrical and financial failure.
I'll tell you right from the start that the game is better than the movie. It's more surprising that I'm not surprised at this at all, it being not a hard achievment especially with Ubisoft making it. The next question I'll answer is quite naturally "Is this game worth buying?" In most circumstances, probably not.
Let me explain...
For all of you who have played numerous Real-time-Strategy games, this is a unique title and nothing can be more vague than admitting that. The Game boasts about its claimed ability to have 64,000 units in a map at one time. At first I thought, "Wow! Finally a game that I can have an army nearly the size of the real ones the game was made after." Har har har. If it were only that simply great. For starters, the historic battles cannot be considered accurately portrayed which is rather stupid because 64,000 is enough to play out the authentic replication of the Battle of Granicus. In actuality you have closer to 2,000 troops that aren't authentically arrayed and aren't the correct type of troops deployed on the battlefield on either side. The persians had 20,000 cavalry in the battle all along the shore of the Granicus river which Alexander the Great charged across. There is very few cavalry on the persian side, only making up the flanks of the army with "Slingman" making up both army fronts. There's also a great absence of the phalanx which was 60% of Alexander's army. All in all, all the battles are dissapointingly innacurate and you can make bigger armies than all of the battles on your own constructing a town on a different level which is a joke in itself because how much memory would it have taken then to just have big armies in the battles?
What is cool however is the units are depicted very nicely (save the game's terrible engine) and are capeable of many difficult authentic troop maneuvers. Unfortunately however, these manuevers are only fundamentally nice to look at because when you're engaged in a battle for land or your town is threatened, it's a waste of time to tell every unit of troops exactly what position you want them to be in which they screw up most of the time because the game was not properly configured with the uneven ground, causing the troops to screw up the execution of formation. Not to mention it's practically impossible when in a rush to execute a real strategic attack and even worse yet to control your army. Also what's dissapointing is many of the units are labled wrong. Not to say they have all the right titles but on the wrong soldiers but they have these names for well known Macedonian and Persian troops etc. that I've never even heard of. For example, a phalangite (single phalanx soldier) is called a sarissofor. Deriving from Sarissa which is the name of the pikes or 18 foot long poles they were armed with. I've never heard of that. Also They spelt the name "Hypaspist" wrong too whom aren't armed with Sarissas like in history but swords probably to superficially help the game's appeal...stupid. And The Grand old Companionship Philotas (Alexander's wonderful cavalry) are called "Cataphractus's". That's nonsense too. And the Persian Catharges (their failing answer to Alexander's phalangites) incredibly is absent in the game itself! Also, what's really annoying is that none of the troops automatically will attack an enemy building. This is either because it wasn't thought through or they wanted to show your army has discipline on the battle field which is ofcourse a bunch of hogwash when we're talking about gameplay here. Also, only archers and peltast's can attack buildings (units that can shoot or throw) so the rest of your army is almost useless when you're trying to destroy a city or Fortress you've rightfully breached and subjugated. The cavalry is good however at killing newly recruited units though, so it's not a total headache but the fact none will attack enemy buildings on their own kills that rationality and makes it into a gaming aneurism!
Moving on to Graphics and Gameplay. The Graphics, taking into account the gaming industries present progressive look and standards, without-a-doubt fall short, especially the clarity of the individual troops. The terrain itself isn't so bad looking and is actually nice to look at as well as the seas but the real problem here is the data-processing in the gameplay. I had to buy a new Video Card to run it so you can guess I had my hopes up. But even with 512 MB of RAM, the game is almost always slow (I'm not even talking about Multiplayer [that's a headache]). So slow in fact, at some points it slows down so terrible, your orders from the mouse on units are either misunderstood or just outright ignored until there's some let-up in the data bottle-kneck. It's obvious they traded graphic quality to bring you a large amount of units on the screen but it doesn't frankly help because there are just too many problems with building a game like this that revolves around Numbers and Strategic Troop Formations (which neither idea were carried out successfully [may I remind you I haven't even really gotten into the game itself]). Also, there are many commands absent that even WC2 was equipped with. There are however some features that are revolutionary like for example the idea that the amount of resources should not be controlled by the amount that comes in at any given time but simply by just how many people you have gathering them which makes things so much easier. In other words, your resources are a steady stream up and the more people you have gathering them, the faster it goes up. That was a good idea and makes sense when you have so many damn units to build. Also, the Barracks just basically spits out guys continuously instead of waiting for each one, therefore eliminating the requirement for you to build a small city of the same buildings (although you will need to do that in customs and multiplayer anyway, naturally, which just kills the game data-flow). Another thing absent that I didn't like was that the units don't vocally respond when you click on them. I found that made the game very bland which didn't help with all the bugs in it.
The last annoying thing I'm going to tell you about is the price and speed of buildings. It takes forever to build anything in this game so you can't send off one worker to build something but rather nab atleast three of them which is a real hassle because you'll always forget what the hell they were doing before, causing you to make more peasants. This can also unknowingly lead to a shortage of workers in one aspect of your economy which at worst can cause a freeze of expansion (building buildings or units) making you waste your time by building more peasants. You'll be surprised how long it takes to build a guard tower and humouresly and ironically, you'll be surprised how useless they are! Bwa ha ha ha. As for shortages of peasants, I used to just take them off of farming because that's where they always go anyway if you don't tell a newly recruited peasant what to do but I found out to my misfortune that your economy and army grows so fast and needs so much food, it can be risky if not dangerous to take too many men off of farming because the need for people doing any given job in the game just like a real economy only goes up and farming is most crucial and most important part in a nutshell. (That was a run-on
) I guess the makers figured that and decided it to be best to just make them go farm. The problem with this however (the makers were reluctant to let workers stand around) is many times you want or need workers to just stand around which makes this all the more annoying considering that big explanation i just gave you.
Two more parts to this Review and then I'm done.
The next part is obviously "How the hell is the actual game, moron?"
The actual game isn't too bad. The Gameplay really isn't that bad when time is spaced out and completing your objective time-wise is up to you. Taking into consideration about the flaws I've just told you, some of the things are still dissapointing but when you're rolling along, and everythings new and all you have to do is make cool armies and a navy (you use the army WAAAAAAY more however) to destroy it, you'll find yourself hopefully for the most part enjoying the game. The only real part of the game that stands out as just terrible are the freelance missions when Alexander goes off somewhere with a handful of troops and you have to bring him from point A to B,C,D,E etc. (not necessarily in that order, thank God) to complete boring objectives, it makes you want to just skip the level which I did quite often unless I thought the mission boards had some value to them which very few I considered.
You're probably wondering how the story is woven into the game and how well it works. Well, it's cool that they have some of the scenes from the movie which by themselves, work good for the game (and not in their entirety, see my review on the movie), the voice-overs are a bad joke. The writing is terrible at best and makes you wonder who the hell they actually got to do the voice-overs so terribly because anyone could do a better job with such a small part of the creation process yet such a big part in the actual gaming experience. You must be able to get some good deals on drugs down at ubisoft. After seeing all of them, they're really not worth watching or listening to.
One thing that's cool though is it has the map of Alexander's Empire and after every level, your Empire expands. Yes, I know, this is something to be expected but it makes the game feel like a real game, at least. There are campaigns for each race in the game so you can change history in it by beating Alexander when he wasn't beaten and see how it plays out. Not bad. So over all, the actual game isn't too bad and it's really a decent game, after all its quirks. It's not a good game and by far not a great game but it is a decent game that You Will have fun with, atleast in the campaigns.
Customs
The customs aren't that good knowing that after all is said and done in a game, if it's a good game, it's on to the customs and the multiplayer but the customs weren't really thought out and some just don't work when you take into consideration of how it really is to play the game and utilize the terrrain. In other words, many maps were evidently not made thinking about the game itself. Some games had worse customs but the worst part of all just like the multiplayer that you don't really get in the actual game is the data bog-down. It's best to do 1on1 which isn't that fun either.
Finally the most dissapointing part of all in this game is your inability to create your own maps, argot, battles. This would have in my book made the game worth while. It's not a great town-builder like WC, SC, C&C, Rome, etc but all that could've been irrelevant if you could make your own battles. There are so many different units in the game and you're allowed so many, you could spend most of your time in your history from start to finish of playing this game just making up battles and strategizing. That would have made this game shine...a little. That's all I would've needed. I could then thankfully recreate the battle of Granicus and Gaugamela the right way and hae fun with it. But alas, you're stuck with playing with the rules of the game only and what they created. You can to a degree make you're own customs but it's no feature compared to creating your own battles. That really should've been the second biggest point emphasized in the game because let's face it, this game with all its flaws and data bottle-knecks will never be a popular multiplayer game so they should have at least gave us the freedom to design our own maps. It's sad...yes, I know. So, I'm going to give this game three scores. 1. The game itself in its entirety. 2. How the game stands up to what it ideally should/could've been and 3. How good this game is given the games out right now.
1. 5.75/10 2. 4.5/10 3. 3.9/10
It's okay though folks. There will be another one made about him one of these days that will have the effort and time put into it we wanted so don't worry about it. But the game isn't really that bad. It was just badly rushed.
I'll tell you right from the start that the game is better than the movie. It's more surprising that I'm not surprised at this at all, it being not a hard achievment especially with Ubisoft making it. The next question I'll answer is quite naturally "Is this game worth buying?" In most circumstances, probably not.
Let me explain...For all of you who have played numerous Real-time-Strategy games, this is a unique title and nothing can be more vague than admitting that. The Game boasts about its claimed ability to have 64,000 units in a map at one time. At first I thought, "Wow! Finally a game that I can have an army nearly the size of the real ones the game was made after." Har har har. If it were only that simply great. For starters, the historic battles cannot be considered accurately portrayed which is rather stupid because 64,000 is enough to play out the authentic replication of the Battle of Granicus. In actuality you have closer to 2,000 troops that aren't authentically arrayed and aren't the correct type of troops deployed on the battlefield on either side. The persians had 20,000 cavalry in the battle all along the shore of the Granicus river which Alexander the Great charged across. There is very few cavalry on the persian side, only making up the flanks of the army with "Slingman" making up both army fronts. There's also a great absence of the phalanx which was 60% of Alexander's army. All in all, all the battles are dissapointingly innacurate and you can make bigger armies than all of the battles on your own constructing a town on a different level which is a joke in itself because how much memory would it have taken then to just have big armies in the battles?
What is cool however is the units are depicted very nicely (save the game's terrible engine) and are capeable of many difficult authentic troop maneuvers. Unfortunately however, these manuevers are only fundamentally nice to look at because when you're engaged in a battle for land or your town is threatened, it's a waste of time to tell every unit of troops exactly what position you want them to be in which they screw up most of the time because the game was not properly configured with the uneven ground, causing the troops to screw up the execution of formation. Not to mention it's practically impossible when in a rush to execute a real strategic attack and even worse yet to control your army. Also what's dissapointing is many of the units are labled wrong. Not to say they have all the right titles but on the wrong soldiers but they have these names for well known Macedonian and Persian troops etc. that I've never even heard of. For example, a phalangite (single phalanx soldier) is called a sarissofor. Deriving from Sarissa which is the name of the pikes or 18 foot long poles they were armed with. I've never heard of that. Also They spelt the name "Hypaspist" wrong too whom aren't armed with Sarissas like in history but swords probably to superficially help the game's appeal...stupid. And The Grand old Companionship Philotas (Alexander's wonderful cavalry) are called "Cataphractus's". That's nonsense too. And the Persian Catharges (their failing answer to Alexander's phalangites) incredibly is absent in the game itself! Also, what's really annoying is that none of the troops automatically will attack an enemy building. This is either because it wasn't thought through or they wanted to show your army has discipline on the battle field which is ofcourse a bunch of hogwash when we're talking about gameplay here. Also, only archers and peltast's can attack buildings (units that can shoot or throw) so the rest of your army is almost useless when you're trying to destroy a city or Fortress you've rightfully breached and subjugated. The cavalry is good however at killing newly recruited units though, so it's not a total headache but the fact none will attack enemy buildings on their own kills that rationality and makes it into a gaming aneurism!
Moving on to Graphics and Gameplay. The Graphics, taking into account the gaming industries present progressive look and standards, without-a-doubt fall short, especially the clarity of the individual troops. The terrain itself isn't so bad looking and is actually nice to look at as well as the seas but the real problem here is the data-processing in the gameplay. I had to buy a new Video Card to run it so you can guess I had my hopes up. But even with 512 MB of RAM, the game is almost always slow (I'm not even talking about Multiplayer [that's a headache]). So slow in fact, at some points it slows down so terrible, your orders from the mouse on units are either misunderstood or just outright ignored until there's some let-up in the data bottle-kneck. It's obvious they traded graphic quality to bring you a large amount of units on the screen but it doesn't frankly help because there are just too many problems with building a game like this that revolves around Numbers and Strategic Troop Formations (which neither idea were carried out successfully [may I remind you I haven't even really gotten into the game itself]). Also, there are many commands absent that even WC2 was equipped with. There are however some features that are revolutionary like for example the idea that the amount of resources should not be controlled by the amount that comes in at any given time but simply by just how many people you have gathering them which makes things so much easier. In other words, your resources are a steady stream up and the more people you have gathering them, the faster it goes up. That was a good idea and makes sense when you have so many damn units to build. Also, the Barracks just basically spits out guys continuously instead of waiting for each one, therefore eliminating the requirement for you to build a small city of the same buildings (although you will need to do that in customs and multiplayer anyway, naturally, which just kills the game data-flow). Another thing absent that I didn't like was that the units don't vocally respond when you click on them. I found that made the game very bland which didn't help with all the bugs in it.
The last annoying thing I'm going to tell you about is the price and speed of buildings. It takes forever to build anything in this game so you can't send off one worker to build something but rather nab atleast three of them which is a real hassle because you'll always forget what the hell they were doing before, causing you to make more peasants. This can also unknowingly lead to a shortage of workers in one aspect of your economy which at worst can cause a freeze of expansion (building buildings or units) making you waste your time by building more peasants. You'll be surprised how long it takes to build a guard tower and humouresly and ironically, you'll be surprised how useless they are! Bwa ha ha ha. As for shortages of peasants, I used to just take them off of farming because that's where they always go anyway if you don't tell a newly recruited peasant what to do but I found out to my misfortune that your economy and army grows so fast and needs so much food, it can be risky if not dangerous to take too many men off of farming because the need for people doing any given job in the game just like a real economy only goes up and farming is most crucial and most important part in a nutshell. (That was a run-on
) I guess the makers figured that and decided it to be best to just make them go farm. The problem with this however (the makers were reluctant to let workers stand around) is many times you want or need workers to just stand around which makes this all the more annoying considering that big explanation i just gave you. Two more parts to this Review and then I'm done.
The next part is obviously "How the hell is the actual game, moron?"
The actual game isn't too bad. The Gameplay really isn't that bad when time is spaced out and completing your objective time-wise is up to you. Taking into consideration about the flaws I've just told you, some of the things are still dissapointing but when you're rolling along, and everythings new and all you have to do is make cool armies and a navy (you use the army WAAAAAAY more however) to destroy it, you'll find yourself hopefully for the most part enjoying the game. The only real part of the game that stands out as just terrible are the freelance missions when Alexander goes off somewhere with a handful of troops and you have to bring him from point A to B,C,D,E etc. (not necessarily in that order, thank God) to complete boring objectives, it makes you want to just skip the level which I did quite often unless I thought the mission boards had some value to them which very few I considered.
You're probably wondering how the story is woven into the game and how well it works. Well, it's cool that they have some of the scenes from the movie which by themselves, work good for the game (and not in their entirety, see my review on the movie), the voice-overs are a bad joke. The writing is terrible at best and makes you wonder who the hell they actually got to do the voice-overs so terribly because anyone could do a better job with such a small part of the creation process yet such a big part in the actual gaming experience. You must be able to get some good deals on drugs down at ubisoft. After seeing all of them, they're really not worth watching or listening to.
One thing that's cool though is it has the map of Alexander's Empire and after every level, your Empire expands. Yes, I know, this is something to be expected but it makes the game feel like a real game, at least. There are campaigns for each race in the game so you can change history in it by beating Alexander when he wasn't beaten and see how it plays out. Not bad. So over all, the actual game isn't too bad and it's really a decent game, after all its quirks. It's not a good game and by far not a great game but it is a decent game that You Will have fun with, atleast in the campaigns.
Customs
The customs aren't that good knowing that after all is said and done in a game, if it's a good game, it's on to the customs and the multiplayer but the customs weren't really thought out and some just don't work when you take into consideration of how it really is to play the game and utilize the terrrain. In other words, many maps were evidently not made thinking about the game itself. Some games had worse customs but the worst part of all just like the multiplayer that you don't really get in the actual game is the data bog-down. It's best to do 1on1 which isn't that fun either.
Finally the most dissapointing part of all in this game is your inability to create your own maps, argot, battles. This would have in my book made the game worth while. It's not a great town-builder like WC, SC, C&C, Rome, etc but all that could've been irrelevant if you could make your own battles. There are so many different units in the game and you're allowed so many, you could spend most of your time in your history from start to finish of playing this game just making up battles and strategizing. That would have made this game shine...a little. That's all I would've needed. I could then thankfully recreate the battle of Granicus and Gaugamela the right way and hae fun with it. But alas, you're stuck with playing with the rules of the game only and what they created. You can to a degree make you're own customs but it's no feature compared to creating your own battles. That really should've been the second biggest point emphasized in the game because let's face it, this game with all its flaws and data bottle-knecks will never be a popular multiplayer game so they should have at least gave us the freedom to design our own maps.
It's sad...yes, I know. So, I'm going to give this game three scores. 1. The game itself in its entirety. 2. How the game stands up to what it ideally should/could've been and 3. How good this game is given the games out right now. 1. 5.75/10 2. 4.5/10 3. 3.9/10
It's okay though folks. There will be another one made about him one of these days that will have the effort and time put into it we wanted so don't worry about it. But the game isn't really that bad. It was just badly rushed.
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Last edited by Krackalackin; 04-04-05 at 02:53 AM.