Amazons & Aliens tries to bring a sense of humor to the usually serious real-time strategy genre, but it doesn't quite succeed. The game isn't all bad, but its easy campaigns and straightforward, simplistic gameplay mean that it won't last you for very long.
Amazons & Aliens is a real-time strategy game that focuses on empire building - you build up a town full of specialized buildings and manage your population so that enough food and raw materials are available and in use at all times. The game pits three very different-looking races against one another: bikini-clad Amazons, blue humanoids named Pimmons, and an insectlike race known as the Sajiki. Each race is sufficiently different in physical appearance and building style, but each has access to the same basic technology tree, which makes them all virtually equivalent in how they play. There are a few unique buildings available to the different races - for example, the questionable Sajiki Hall of Orgies - but each building has a rougly equivalent counterpart for the other races.
The gameplay is fairly typical of the genre. You start out with a master builder and a pair of grunt-type workers who carry raw materials to each building site. When nothing is being built, your grunts can gather food from nearby bushes. If you want to do anything more elaborate, you need to build a school and train hunters, miners, woodcutters, and other specialists.
The 2D graphics are tile-based and are well detailed for the most part. In fact, the graphics may be the game's strongest point. The terrain is well done, and many of the buildings look interesting. The various units are easily identifiable. Some are rather humorous, such as the Amazon diplomat who struts around wearing a giant top hat and carrying a little black briefcase. But most of the animations are simplistic, and in some instances, the game could have used some more polish. For example, when a worker drops off some materials at a building site, there's no trace of wood or stone on the ground.
The combat in Amazons & Aliens has a similar problem and gives the sense that the game was intended to be as nonviolent as possible. Sure, you can build armies and attack your enemies, but you won't see any blood or gore when you defeat your foes. In fact, you won't even see any dead bodies or any smoke or fire when a building is destroyed. It's certainly true that a game doesn't need violent content to be good - but the absence of anything in this vein seems very odd in a game that includes a Hall of Orgies. Besides, to successfully vanquish an enemy in Amazons & Aliens, you literally have to hunt down and slaughter every last one of his people - a harsh requirement in a game that's so visually sterile.
Another problem with Amazons & Aliens is its level of difficulty. Anyone with a good amount of experience playing real-time strategy games should be able to cruise through Amazons & Aliens in no time at all. Even though the documentation claims that the campaign for each race is more difficult than the last, you'll be hard-pressed to spot any significant differences between them. An "endless" game mode is also available, which lets you play the game for as long as you like as you build up your city. But unlike in most empire-building games, you'll probably be able to take over the entire map within a couple of hours in Amazons & Aliens.
The computer opponent's artificial intelligence is not very smart, and it will waste time building houses, police stations, and confectioneries while your armies systematically destroy its cities. And even though the game includes a diplomacy feature, it pretty much is just on cruise control from the moment you build an embassy in your city. If you decide to make war on your neighbors and they send a diplomat to ask for peace, your embassy will immediately accept. The only impact this has on the game is in regard to trade: You cannot conduct trade with a race with which you are currently at war.
Amazons & Aliens has its good points. The graphics are clean, the humorous theme generally works, and the variety of units and buildings available is impressive. But Amazons & Aliens has no lasting appeal if you're experienced with other empire-building real-time strategy games. It's ultimately too simple and too easy.
