The slow and slightly upset

I usually prefer short games filled with action than long games with slow development, that's another thing that bothered me of this game. While it's not a waiting game, there's a lot of time at the beginning of each game during which you spend your time doing nothing. But then, when the game advances, you will have to buy upgrades, handle an enormous army, expand, buy units, research technology and many more things.

This makes it very hard to handle your army. There are many features to help control your army in that later stage. Resource gathering for example, has been kept very simple. To gather special resources create caravans, to mine just create miners.

Building is another thing that changes from the usual strategy titles; here you have a city, which can have economy sectors, army sectors, special sectors and imperial sectors. Having bigger cities will give you bonuses, for example, one of the races can build industrial sectors to gather technology points, which can be exchanged for various updates or special units.

Bleeding edge: Your wallet after buying new hardware to play

The graphics in the game are good and lots of explosions and special effects make for lots of eye candy, but it is also the biggest downfall of the game. So much eye candy and so many characters on screen make the game play slow even on the most basic video settings.

I turned off every advanced video option, lowered the quality of textures and animations and lowered the resolution all the way down to 800x600 and I couldn't finish a game in a large map because the game slows down and eventually freezes, and while my computer isn't shiny new it's still a respectable AMD64 3200+ with 1GB of RAM and a Radeon 9550 based video card with 256Mb of VRAM.

The interface is clean and clear, very similar to the interface of all the Age of Empires titles, one of the few problems I found was that the options menu (especially the video options) has too many options, they should hide some of those or change the layout, there are screens with over 30 check boxes where there are so many options you don't even care to change them. Beginning to play on the other hand is as simple as adding players, choosing a race and a map.

Rouding up

One of the things I always miss on strategy titles not made by Blizzard is the amazing detail that goes to audio. This game has good voice acting in its cut scenes but in-game audio is limited to grunts and short dialogues which are hardly noticeable.

Thanks to a change in its style of play, the addition of new races, an interesting campaign and its long list of features Rise of Legends is an excellent game, well worth its price, but its steep system requirements and seemingly endless games keep it far from stealing Blizzard's crown in the strategy genre.