Roma victor!
Slaughtering barbarian hordes, plundering the villages of your enemies, obliterating enemy fortifications with catapults, those were the days. Pyro Studios, best known for its Commandos series of games helps us return to the glory days of the Roman Empire with its latest RTS: Praetorians.
Set during the rule of Julius Caesar around the year 58 B.C. The twenty-four mission campaign takes players from the winter landscapes of Gaul to the barren, arid deserts of Arabia and back again. The variety of objectives within the missions themselves makes them worthwhile and entertaining. The generic ‘build your army and destroy the enemy’ missions are only a small aspect of Praetorians. Other missions will see you securing bridges, defending fortifications, and even in one mission your objective is to simply, “run!” The missions are strung together through a rather loose storyline that includes a caliber of voice acting which would make even Resident Evil’s original directors weep. That aside, the intermittent CGI movies present in the campaign do have some redeeming qualities to them.
Mediocre and average are a few words that come to mind when describing the game’s sounds. The soundtrack features a limited number of tracks that repeat over and over again. These are occasionally interrupted with battle music that chimes in whenever units engage the enemy. While each side does have their own unique sounds they can be categorized into one of three groups—commanding units, healing units, and everything else. Cavalry will sound the same as archers, foot infantry, and everything else in the game bar the physician and commanding unit. This does affect game play in large battles where people may have to select units in a hurry. The last thing commanders want is to send a fresh troop of auxiliary infantry into a horde of German cavalry. This is by no means a major flaw; though it does detract some from an otherwise pleasant gaming experience.
Praetorians’ graphics engine, while far from a graphical smorgasbord, does justice to the game. The unit animations are crisp and clear, this is most evident when watching the Roman Legionnaires march in perfect step. Structures, while not graphically awe inspiring, are rendered adequately to suit the games needs. Landscapes within the game have their quirks as well. Tall fields of grass will sway in the breeze; birds will flee the treetops at the slightest hint of a human presence. When Rome’s legions have to march in particularly harsh conditions, players will see blizzards of snowfall and swirling sandstorms over their armies. All these touches do a fine job of immersing the player in an environment rich with life and activity.
Game play and being user-friendly is where this title shines. Traditional resource gathering is not present in Praetorians. There is no gold to collect, no wood to chop down, not even a single piece of ore to harvest. The only necessity to training troops is to have control of a village. Villages provide armies with populations from which armies can recruit into their ranks. Honor points and unit control points do limit how many or which type of infantry can be bought however. Unit control points dictate the maximum amount of infantry a commander can have on the map. This is normally a map preset stuck at 500. Honor points are acquired in battle; the more enemies you kill, the more honor points you acquire. There are a limited amount of structures and weapons that can be built also. Using the basic infantry unit for each side, players can construct defense towers, catapults, and assault towers to name a few. While there is no limit to the amount of structures that can be built, building weapons like the catapult and ballista will require men to operate them.
The standard right-click interface is included in the game so normal RTS gamers are greeted with an easy to understand interface that can be used to do almost everything with troops. Troops can be arranged into both individual and multiple groups. There are convenient buttons and hotkeys that will allow players to divide, balance, and join their respective groups of soldiers. This is a feature that will be of immense use to people, including myself, who are picky about not having straggler groups of soldiers with only one or two units.
Infantry have multiple roles and abilities in Praetorians. Officer units and certain hero units have an experience aura around them. This aura gives an offensive attack bonus to surrounding troops of the same side. These units gain levels by being close to enemies that are killed. At lower levels the extra offensive power may not be noticeable. Once the officer and hero units become highly experienced however, nearby friendly units can devastate enemy ranks in seconds. Individual types of units also have varying formations which they can execute. Roman spearmen and their German and Arabian counterparts have a stationary formation that will massacre enemy cavalry. Also, it wouldn’t be proper to include Legionnaires in a game without having the infamous turtle formation which renders archers practically useless.
Praetorians makes good use of terrain features for combat. Cliffs around the map can be used to increase archers range and line of sight. Forests litter the map in some missions and can be used as cover for certain types of infantry. These forests make seemingly innocent trails into perfect ambush points. When isolated cliffs are covered in a thick brush, archers can take refuge and wreak havoc on enemy columns. Tall grass can be used for ambushes as well but at a cost. If enemy archers are nearby and spot your army, they can launch fire tipped arrows that will incinerate the grass, and your men.
The game features three sides in the campaign—the Romans, the Germans, and the Arabs. The main fault of this game is that all three sides feel exactly the same. Each side does have a few unique units with different abilities but for the most part the armies are a carbon copy of one another. There are subtle differences between some infantry types and cavalry such as range and hit points but it doesn’t differentiate the sides enough to consider all of them truly unique. This may be advertised as balance but hardcore RTS players will not be fooled.
Lets not beat around the bush, Praetorians is hard. Even experienced RTS gamers will find a few challenges in the easy mode. I have forgotten the number of times I had to reload a mission because one thing or another went wrong and led to the obliteration of my legions. It isn’t the AI outsmarting the players so much as it is sheer numbers. More than once I can recall simply being overrun when my forces were spread too thin. More often than not the solution to this is to ignore your objectives and hunker down, build defenses, and hold your position to blunt the enemy offensive.
As stated before the AI isn’t to be feared. The game will often throw physicians and other unarmed or nearly unarmed units directly into the front line. If a group of soldiers comes under fire they will sometimes leave the rest of the legions to engage whoever is firing at them. This normally turns into a long and arduous journey which almost always leaves your rouge soldiers slaughtered as they stumble into the entire enemy army. It is these type of situations that commands player’s total attention to the battlefield and often lead to frustration. To give the AI some credit, it does have its moments of brilliance. Computer controlled cavalry will frequently weave and dodge within your ranks to attack your most vulnerable units.
Online play is possible with Praetorians and is handled through any third party matchmaking software that supports it. LAN play is also possible and both online and LAN can support up to eight players depending on the map. The absence of a direct multiplayer interface within the game may turn some gamers off but plenty of matches can be found on programs like Gamespy Arcade and All Seeing Eye to name a few. Multiplayer basically boils down to building up units and conquering the enemy. A bit repetitious yes, but players should get a decent amount of playing from this.
Praetorians strays off the beaten path with the absence of a resource gathering method but this frees players up to focus more on the melee combat that always ensues. Real Time Strategy veterans will find that Praetorians offers a unique challenge compared to other games in the genre. Despite its flaws, Praetorians is a solid product that will offer many hours of enjoyment.