Last year's Stronghold was a slightly uneven combination of city builder and real-time strategy game, with an emphasis on siege warfare. It had the distinction of being the only castle simulation from a major publisher since Interplay released Quicksilver's Castles II in 1992. Aspiring warlords could forgive Stronghold's shortcomings, since the original game gave them the opportunity to build and raze walls, pillage countrysides, and launch cattle from catapults. Firefly Studios has now polished up its old game nicely and has sent it on a long road trip into the Crusades.

The new watchtower can fire farther.

Stronghold: Crusader is the stand-alone successor to Stronghold, meaning you don't need the original Stronghold to play it. It takes Stronghold out of Europe and into the Holy Lands, giving it a tighter focus and a more exotic flavor. The economic missions that had you racing against the clock to fulfill contrived objectives have been removed from the game. Instead, Stronghold: Crusader places more emphasis on the fine art of defending or storming a castle. After all, isn't this what you want when you pick up a box with a knight standing in front of a castle? When players first looked at the box for the original Stronghold, they probably wouldn't have guessed that they'd be spending their time accumulating 500 units of cheese.

Indeed, the original Stronghold divided its single-player missions into two types: military and economic, though the latter, which generally involved raising crops and stockpiling resources, wasn't as popular as the military missions. It also had a single-player skirmish mode and head-to-head multiplayer. But Stronghold: Crusader presents you with many more options. For instance, you can play skirmish games against AI opponents on a number of different maps, even in multiplayer. Some are completely even playing fields, while some feature interesting balance dilemmas, giving advantages and disadvantages to each player. The skirmish maps can be played against your choice of AI opponents or in multiplayer games.

However, players who are new to Stronghold's economic model, which actually folds elegantly into its combat model without upstaging it, will likely want to start out by playing with the castle-builder option. This is a sandbox mode that, like in the original game, lets you learn the unique features of Crusader's new desert maps without having to worry about fielding an army to defend against attacks.

But the centerpiece of the single-player game is the "crusader trail," which presents a series of 50 battles, each more difficult than the last. As you play, your performance determines the ongoing date, which serves as your score. You can go backward to replay old missions, and if you do better, the date will roll back. Although this doesn't have much impact on the actual missions, it's an interesting alternative to tracking a score based on points.

Farmland is hard to come by in the desert.

Unlike the missions in Stronghold's military campaign, most of the missions in the crusader trail let you build you own castle. This makes it more like a series of skirmishes than the original game's linear sequence of canned scenarios with prebuilt castles. The crusader trail missions do a good job of incorporating specific units and strategies, and you will gradually improve your skills as it ramps up the difficulty level. In addition to a basic tutorial, there are four historical campaigns, in which each chapter highlights specific game elements, such as which units are best suited for which purposes, how to manage your taxes, and the differences between various crops. Each mission in these campaigns is like a puzzle with a historical context, which, once solved, will teach you to play better. Stronghold: Crusader has numerous options to introduce new players to the game as well as plenty of challenges for veterans of the original Stronghold.

Stronghold: Crusader makes some important changes to the dynamics of the original game. Most significant is the addition of seven new Arabian mercenary units, some fairly redundant (Arabian bows are just weaker archers), some potentially overpowered (the horse archers are a potent combination of speed and ranged attack), and some adding unique game dynamics (assassins can secretly open gate towers to let your units into an enemy's castle). The new units are all hired from the mercenary camp, which can be built cheaply as soon as you start building your castle. To recruit them, you don't have to harvest resources, construct weapons, and accumulate an arsenal in your armory, like you have to with their European counterparts. Instead, just fork over some gold, and these new Arabian units will show up.

The fact that military units come into play much more quickly in Stronghold: Crusader than they did in the original game has a dramatic effect on gameplay. Because the marketplace can quickly give you gold, which can now quickly give you an army, it's an important military building. If you're attacked, you can convert your goods to gold and hire instant defenders. To get down to conquering, there's no immediate need for iron, leather, wood, tanners, blacksmiths, or pole turners.

Arabian mercenaries bring combat into play sooner.

To be fair, mercenaries aren't as powerful as the traditional military units, but they definitely change the way Stronghold is played. Some of the scenarios can be easily beaten by simply selling off your starting goods, using the gold to hire mercenaries, and then rushing the AI. Of course, this also means you'll be attacked much earlier in a scenario. There's nothing quite so annoying as watching a mob of cheap slaves torching your outlying farms before you can marshal your defenses. The end result is that Stronghold: Crusader plays much more like a traditional combat-oriented real-time strategy game than its predecessor.

There are some other differences between Stronghold: Crusader and the previous game that may seem subtle at first. For instance, religion and ale have more impact on your people's happiness in Stronghold: Crusader. Religion cost too much gold and ale required too many steps in the resource chain to be really useful in the original game. But in Stronghold: Crusader, they have a more powerful benefit--they are effective ways to offset high taxes, food shortages, and crowding. Even better, you can improve efficiency by adorning your castle with more "bad things," like gallows and dungeons, while serving up religion and ale to counter the happiness penalties. Although these may seem like minor tweaks, they do a good job of adding more choices to how you play.

After fighting Stronghold's European warlords (who make a return appearance in Crusader), it's nice to get out and see the world. The desert terrain and buildings look great, breathing a lot of new life into the game's detailed 2D engine. The new music is rousing and distinctive, and it's always a thrill to hear the war cry when you mass-select a group of soldiers and give them attack orders. Visually and aurally, Stronghold: Crusader certainly does justice to its subject matter.

The Middle Eastern setting allows for a new architectural look and terrain set, but unlike the changes to the architecture, the changes to the terrain aren't simply cosmetic. Because you can't build farms in the desert, the patches of fertile land on some maps are important strategic points. This also makes Crusader play like a more conventional RTS, since this can take the focus off the castles themselves. Now each side has to secure fertile land to maintain a food supply in these barren environments.

Use more brutality with new religion and ale bonuses.

Stronghold: Crusader's interface still has some of the same problems that the first game had. The building tabs are still haphazardly arranged at the bottom of the screen. There's no way to jump to the subject of important messages such as "We're under attack!" Stronghold could use more tooltips, range indicators for missile units, and a few more hotkeys to keep you from having to wade through your castles and armies to get where you need to go. Because there are no effective unit formations, the tactical AI still requires a fair amount of micromanagement to mount a successful siege, and computer opponents still seem fond of sending units in a steady trickle rather than amassing effective assaults.

But other than these minor problems, Stronghold: Crusader is a marked improvement over the previous game. Considering its new campaign options, more-satisfying single-player missions, and tweaked gameplay, it's a safe bet that fans of the original game will have even more fun storming the castle.

Rise of Nations

Designer Brian Reynolds had already made a name for himself with his work with Sid Meier on turn-based strategy classics such as Civilization II and Alpha Centauri. But Reynolds went off and founded a new studio called Big Huge Games and began work on the historically themed Rise of Nations, a game that has finally arrived on store shelves. This superb strategy game combines the be s t elements of real-time strategy with the conventions of the turn-based blockbusters that Reynolds had worked on previously. By combining some of the concepts of Civilization with the general gameplay of Age of Empires, Reynolds and Big Huge Games have created a truly outstanding game.

Rise of Nations might resemble Microsoft's Age of Empires games at a glance--like other, similar games, it has a host of different civilizations (18, to be exact), each with unique bonuses and four to five unique units. But beyond that, the game has a lot of depth, more so than other real-time strategy games, thanks to novel concepts such as national borders, city assimilation, and more. While these new features might seem foreign to real-time strategy players, fans of Brian Reynolds' turn-based strategy games should know them well.

Unlike in other turn-based games, in Rise of Nations, cities are a focal part of your strategy. Each of your cities has a radius around it that constitutes your national border. You can build other buildings only within your borders, and you can build only a limited number of different improvements for each city (such as a maximum of five farms each). Since expanding your empire depends entirely on your cities, the game makes you think harder about how and where you should expand. This focus on cities also means that each one will become a distinct community, with its own farms, temples, universities, and so on--actual cities will populate your empire, unlike in other real-time strategy games, where most of your structures are at your main base, while your additional town halls exist in isolation near some resources.

This intriguing concept of national borders works as you might have expected it to in an epic turn-based game, such as Civilization. In practice, national borders add depth to the game without being overwhelming. For instance, since your national borders grow with the number of cities you control, you may wish to aggressively expand your empire by building lots of cities, but you'll be limited by the extent of your research in civics. In addition, any troops you send across the borders of an enemy nation sustain attrition damage (to simulate the difficulty in supplying them over vast distances). It's an intuitive feature, and it also prevents your enemies from rushing you early on in the game. However, both you and your opponents can recruit supply wagons that protect armies from attrition damage.

In the meantime, you'll be able to recruit a wide array of different soldiers from different nations across different time periods. Like other real-time strategy games, Rise of Nations uses a rock-paper-scissors unit balance system--for instance, cavalry are devastating against some archer units, while pikemen can make short work of cavalry. Rise of Nations' combat is fast-paced, though it also features interesting tactical considerations, such as flanking and rear attacks, as well as special abilities that your general units can use to provide extra defense for your troops, cause your troops to move on a forced march, or even hide your army briefly to set up an ambush. Cities are also crucial to warfare in Rise of Nations, since successfully attacking a city doesn't destroy it, but instead captures it for your own use. As such, battles over cities are crucial and potentially very rewarding, and they also make the stakes a lot higher in multiplayer battles, which, despite the game's epic historical scale, can often be completed in less than an hour.

Thanks to its turn-based roots, Rise of Nations has other interesting features that aren't common to real-time strategy games, but these features allow the already varied game to offer you even more options. For instance, you can build wonders of the world (just like you could in Civilization), and these powerful monuments can provide bonuses to your troops as they stride into battle in real time. In addition, Rise of Nations doesn't have any troop transports, so you don't have to micromanage your troops as they march individually onto a boat. As long as you have a docks structure in place and the right technology level, all your land-based units will automatically become transports when they cross water. And as you'd expect from a game designed by Civilization II's cocreator, Rise of Nations offers multiple victory conditions to suit a variety of different play styles. You can win by conquest, by controlling 70 percent or more of the entire map, by building or capturing a critical mass of wonders, or by capturing and holding an enemy's capitol.

Rise of Nations' unusual resource model is also noteworthy. Unlike in other real-time strategy games, resource-rich areas don't get depleted. Instead, in order to gather the game's basic resources, you need only place the appropriate gathering site for each resource and assign villagers to these sites, and they'll begin gathering on their own. The knowledge resource, which is vital for most technologies, comes only from the universities that you build for your cities. You can also find rare resources--such as precious minerals, crops, or furs--around the map. If you station a merchant at these sites, they'll give you bonuses to your resources and other benefits. Rise of Nations makes it easy to understand how many resources you are getting and how additional villagers can help you get more. Each building can have only a certain number of villagers in it, and the interface clearly shows how many resources you get per villager working there, though you can research improvements to make your villagers even more efficient.

Of course, with so much of the game's design rooted in the Civilization model, it's no wonder that Rise of Nations' research system also stands head and shoulders above the systems featured in other real-time strategy games. Although it isn't as comprehensive as the technology tree of Civilization III, Rise of Nations' research fields are still broader than those of just about any other real-time strategy game yet. There are four main areas of research: military, civil, commerce, and science. Each area has eight levels, as well as a top-level technology for each area once you reach the eighth stage. However, each of these technologies is balanced fairly well against the others, so you're free to choose the technological path you most prefer without worrying that your unbalanced research might leave you vulnerable in some way. Additionally, you'll conduct most of your research in a single building: the library. The consolidation of most of the game's technology under one roof is a breakthrough in logistics--you no longer have to go hunting for different buildings to conduct research.

Like Age of Empires, Rise of Nations features eight different ages: classical, medieval, gunpowder, enlightenment, industrial, modern, and information. Even though game's timeline begins in the Dark Ages and ends in a futuristic era, it manages to strike a perfect balance between the different ages and the breadth of technologies available in each. And despite all that depth, Rise of Nations is paced well and isn't overly complex--the game's interface makes it easy to understand what you need to do to advance to the next age, and the resource costs of advancement are challenging to meet without being ridiculously expensive.

The only really serious complaint that hard-core strategy fans could level at Rise of Nations is that the game doesn't have a story-based campaign like so many other recent real-time strategy games. Instead, Rise of Nations features a single-player "conquer the world" campaign in which the world is divided into sections, like in the classic board game Risk. You start out as one nation on this map and attempt to literally conquer every other country in the world. Controlling your nation on the world map is turn-based, but when you enter into territory you don't control, the game changes to real-time mode. Interestingly, the campaign offers different scenarios for different territories. In one territory, your mission might be to withstand a barbarian raid for 30 minutes. In another, it might be to race across a map to destroy a barbarian encampment. In a contested territory, you might have a normal conquest game in which you must eliminate the enemy. Capturing and holding additional territories gives you benefits, such as an extra army or resource bonuses you can take with you into every tactical battle. However, this campaign, which is really just a glorified version of Risk, isn't as developed as the actual real-time game. Still, it's enjoyable, if a bit simple, and it adds a substantial single-player component to the game.

In many ways, Rise of Nations is better than the strategy games that have come before it. It's smarter. It's more challenging. It gives you more to do. It also has a highly customizable multiplayer component, as well as good tutorials that will help new players get started quickly. The game even has fairly detailed graphics, especially for the different civilizations' architecture, as well as good sound effects and a dynamic music score that changes to reflect what's happening on the battlefield. But what really sets Rise of Nations apart are all the new concepts it introduces--cities, attrition damage, commerce caps, caravans, rare resources, a broader and more distinct technology element, national borders, and more make the game deeper and in many ways more enjoyable than any other real-time strategy game to date. For years, real-time and turn-based strategy games sat at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of their gameplay and audience; very few games have even tried to bridge the gap between them. But now, these two distinct styles of strategy have come together in the form of a truly excellent game.

Rome: Total War

Rome: Total War is the third Total War game from England's Creative Assembly, and, to make a long story short, it's the best one yet. It was naturally expected to build on its illustrious predecessors, which featured epic-scale real-time battles and impressive attention to historical realism and detail. Shogun: Total War was a promising start for the series, while Medieval: Total War built on that promise to create an even more engrossing strategy game. With Rome: Total War, Creative Assembly takes the next step, and it's as much a revolutionary step as it is an evolutionary one, thanks to a beautiful new 3D graphics engine that makes the series' tactical battles--featuring thousands of soldiers--better than ever. The results are nothing short of spectacular, helping make Rome: Total War the very definition of an epic strategy game.

As in the earlier Total War games, there are essentially two distinctly different types of gameplay in Rome. There's the overarching turn-based campaign in which you conquer cities and provinces, make improvements, and move armies around the map as you expand your empire, and then there are the real-time battles in which you use tactics and maneuvers to crush your enemy in combat. After the helpful and informative tutorial campaign, you can tackle the main imperial campaign. You play as one of three powerful Roman families--the Julii, the Bruti, or the Scipii--attempting to increase the size and glory of Rome and shore up your faction's power and influence. As all three factions are Roman, there's literally no difference between them in terms of units and building types, though they do have different responsibilities. The Julii must deal with the Gauls and Germania to the north in a difficult, landlocked campaign. The Bruti are required to deal with the remnants of the Greek city-states and expand the empire to the southeast. And the Scipii are tasked with subduing Carthage, Rome's great nemesis to the southwest.

At least, that's the principle goal of each faction. But there's a fourth, unplayable Roman faction, one that can influence your course during the campaign: the Roman senate. The senate will order you on missions, from blockading a hostile port or conquering a city (and perhaps exterminating the populace, depending on the level of enmity between Rome and the faction in question) to forging a trade deal or an alliance with a foreign faction. It's up to you whether you actually obey the order, as sometimes the senate will try to stretch you thin on purpose. If you carry the orders out successfully, you stand to gain a monetary reward, a useful new military unit, or influence in the senate. Failing to carry out missions earns the displeasure of the senate and affects your standing with that body. By and large, though, the senate missions help to focus the otherwise huge scope of the campaign--instead of being faced with the monolithic task of trying to conquer Europe, you can instead look forward to accomplishing a long series of short-term goals.

It's helpful to perform senate missions because they can affect an improved feature in Rome: Total War--families. Each of the three Roman factions is essentially one huge family, and your generals and governors are related to one another by birth, marriage, or adoption. These are the leaders of your faction, and they all have traits--strengths and weaknesses--that define their abilities. A strong general may have an excellent command rating, but his disdain for bureaucracy would make him a poor governor. Meanwhile, an otherwise strong governor may have a dislike of farming, which would affect the agricultural output in the province he's in. But if your family members are selected to hold important senate posts, they'll gain influence and abilities once out of office. This introduces a limited role-playing component in the game, as you actually care about trying to further the careers of your family members so they can serve you better.

In addition to traits, family members--not to mention your spies, assassins, and diplomats--can all attract retinues. These are the hangers-on who surround important people, such as advisors, mentors, bodyguards, lackeys, sycophants, and more. Each of these can affect your characters' abilities. For example, a wrestler can improve a character's influence (by being able to literally twist arms), as well as provide added protection against an assassination attempt. You can actually collect and trade retinue members among your family, so you can transfer them to where they're needed the most.

Families are also critical because only family members can serve as generals. You can assemble armies without a general, but they'll be poorly led and will likely fare badly in battle. But with a general, the army's fortune can change. A general with a high command ability is a powerful force in battle, as a well-led smaller force can defeat a poorly led larger force most of the time. On the other hand, the fact that generals are drawn from the ruling family can be dangerous, because you need to make sure there are future generations of leaders and generals. A disastrous battle can wipe out whole branches of the family tree, cutting down promising young sons before they can sire heirs. This can have a crippling effect later on in the campaign, when you find yourself short of qualified generals and governors with a huge empire to manage. It makes for an excellent incentive to try and preserve your generals, rather than treat them as easily replaceable fodder.

Thankfully, when you're short of governors, your cities will be taken over by the "automanager," which is represented by an appointed official who runs the city in your name. You can give the automanager certain priorities, such as to follow a military or financial policy, and it will go about constructing the building and units required. (You can also turn on the automanage functionality in cities that do have governors, if you don't want to micromanage at all.) The computer is generally good at doing what you tell it to do, and this should appeal to players who don't want to spend a lot of time on the campaign map. But if you're a fan of grand strategy and want to control every detail, you'll want to make sure you have plenty of family members at your disposal.

When you're not busy trying to crush your opponents, you can try to spy on, trade with, and subvert them. The diplomacy system has been completely overhauled since Medieval: Total War, and you now have a lot more options at your command. These include forming alliances, bullying your neighbors into becoming protectorates of Rome, and bargaining for trade rights. You can also dispatch spies and assassins to probe for weaknesses in enemy defenses, or to take out a key enemy general before a crucial battle. And in a nice twist, you can plant spies in your own cities, where they'll help keep unrest in check by acting as a secret police of sorts, rooting out the troublemakers.

The early to middle part of a campaign game can be quite tough, as you'll be hard-pressed on many fronts without a lot of resources at your disposal. In one particularly brutal game, our Julii faction found itself waging battles with Carthage, Spain, and the Gauls on three fronts. However, if you survive and defeat your enemies, you'll eventually have enough resources and momentum to deal with most other threats. The next big challenge occurs when civil war breaks out and you must march on Rome and defeat your rival Roman factions for control of the empire. This late-game development is particularly challenging, as all the core Roman cities have grown to massive size, and their close proximity to one another makes it easy for factions to throw advanced units at one another.

The imperial campaign runs from the early days of the republic to the peak of its power, a period covering approximately 270 years. Given that each turn represents six months--there are summer and winter turns--this means a campaign game can last more than 500 turns. That's surely an epic-scale length, and a campaign can easily consume days, if not weeks, if you decide to play out all the battles. There's also a smaller campaign that only requires your faction to conquer 15 provinces and eliminate your principal rival or rivals. And in addition to being able to play as the three different Roman factions, you can also tackle the campaign game as a foreign faction, such as Carthage, Britannia, or the Gauls. The only prerequisite is that you must crush the faction in question during a campaign in order to unlock it as a playable side. This is a bit annoying, as you'll probably have to play several campaign games to unlock all the playable factions. But these factions are worth unlocking, because they have access to unique units in the game, including chariots, elephants, and axemen. Also, not every faction in the game is playable, so be careful not to get your hopes up.

The campaign itself takes place on a beautiful 3D map that depicts a living, breathing world. Tiny caravans travel the roads and highways, while ships ply the trade routes between ports. During the winter turns, snow covers most of Europe, and that has an effect on units moving and battling in those conditions. But, most importantly, the new map is easy to read and is a big improvement on the board-game-like maps found in earlier Total War games. There are terrain features such as valleys and rivers that serve as natural strategic choke points on the map, and you can place armies in those positions to block them, thereby protecting your cities from sieges. You can also hide armies in forests, which allows them to ambush passing units, to devastating effect.

Ultimately, the turn-based portion of Rome is an excellent strategic game by itself. Its only flaw is the relatively weak naval combat. Unlike the land battles, you can only autogenerate the results of naval battles--you can't control them or even watch them play out. The results are a bit unpredictable, as you're guaranteed a win only if you have overwhelming numbers on your side. This makes sense, since a battle between two comparable fleets should theoretically be a toss-up, but you'll still feel somewhat helpless at not being able to jump into the battle and help turn the tide in your favor. Furthermore, the results of naval battles are often reported incorrectly--the number of ships reported sunk usually doesn't match up with the number of ships that actually remain. And in certain circumstances, it's possible to get a fleet permanently stuck in position, rendering it useless and a drain on your resources, though we rarely encountered this bug. So the naval battles in Rome: Total War are underwhelming. However, the terrestrial battles most certainly are not.

Of course, the turn-based campaign is only half the story in Rome: Total War, as the most anticipated new feature in the game is the 3D real-time battle engine. The transition from the 2D sprites found in earlier Total War games to Rome's 3D units has an almost revolutionary effect on the battles, as the action comes to life like never before. It's simply amazing to watch battles unfold and to see thousands of soldiers trying to kill each other. Though there a few awkward moments--such as seeing your men scramble around a single soldier they're trying to kill--the carnage is generally well animated and occasionally over the top. You'll see elephants hurl soldiers 30 or 40 feet in the air at times, or see guys fly 20 or more feet after being hit by a cavalry charge. Yet there are countless moments when you can simply zoom in and watch as individual soldiers try to slash and spear each other to death in moments that are reminiscent of the huge battles in recent Hollywood movies.

The 3D engine also has an almost transformative effect on the way you fight battles, as it's a lot easier to comprehend the flow of the fight. It's also easier to differentiate between good and bad tactics, even if you're a novice. If you see the Greek spearmen lower their long spears in formation, you'll intuitively recognize that a frontal cavalry charge against that would be ill advised. But if you can keep the spearmen distracted while you send your cavalry around to their flanks or rear, you can watch your horsemen slice through the Greek lines like a hot knife through butter. You'll also notice that your troops gain experience over time, so it's worth trying to preserve them. After a battle, you can send your units to a city where they can retrain. Doing so will not only restore them to full strength (though a veteran unit may lose experience if it absorbs a lot of new recruits), but it will also upgrade their weapons and armor, making them even more lethal in battle, assuming you've built the improvements necessary to do so at that city.

You'll need a perfect storm of events in order to witness the largest battles possible, so most battles skew toward the smaller scale, with only a couple of thousand troops on the battlefield. These smaller battles still look amazing, and they are easier to manage, as you have fewer troops to worry about. You can pause the action and issue orders at any time, which is extremely helpful, though you don't have that option during a multiplayer game. At the highest detail settings, some of the largest battles and sieges can cause the action to stutter, but even at the lower detail settings the game still looks spectacular. The camera controls take a bit of getting used to at first, but you'll eventually get the hang of it. About the only flaw that we can find in the graphics is that it occasionally feels like you're watching clones on the battlefield, as all the soldiers in a unit look exactly alike. It would have been nice to have seen a little variation in the troops, but most of the time the action onscreen is so hectic you won't notice anyway.

The sound and music during battle also deserve some recognition, since they complement the visuals on the screen very well. When you issue a march order, you hear the stomping of hundreds of boots on the ground and the music changes to a fitting march theme. When battle erupts, the audio stands out, with the clang of steel on shields, the whoosh of spears and arrows in the air, and the cry of thundering elephants. Above it all, the music constantly shifts gears to fit the scene, much like the score to a motion picture. The driving tempo of the music helps sweep you up into the action.

in addition to the campaign game, Rome comes with some historical battles and a skirmish mode that you can play if you want to get straight into the action. Then there's the game's multiplayer suite, which is limited to battles. There are essentially two multiplayer modes: a fast-paced skirmish game and a slower, more tension-filled siege game. The straight skirmish mode tends to run a bit quickly, due to the fact that all the contestants start in the open and it doesn't take long before a faction is wiped out. A good cavalry charge at the beginning can usually settle the battle by crippling one side. Meanwhile, siege battles can be great fun, as they're almost chesslike in that the attackers must probe for a weakness in the city's defenses while the defenders react to them. Rome's multiplayer browser makes it fairly easy to find a server, though the overall interface could have used a bit more work. In particular, there ought to be a time limit when deploying forces, as it can be annoying having to wait while a micromanager tweaks the starting position of every single unit.

But issues like these are easy to overlook when you consider the big picture. Ultimately, this is a deeply satisfying strategy game that can appeal to game players of all types. If you're looking for a complex, addictive, conquer-the-world campaign, you can look forward to the imperial campaign, which is good for countless hours of gameplay all on its own. Meanwhile, if what you want are realistic, cinematic-style battles, you can dive into the historical battles or the skirmish or multiplayer modes, or have the computer manage all the details in the campaign and just join the battles. And if you're looking for both, then you'll probably find Rome: Total War to be perfectly sublime blend of the two.

Age of Empires III

Six years have flown by since Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings became one of the definitive real-time strategy games on the market. Age of Kings typified this style of gaming in many respects, but it innovated and improved the style in many others, establishing the template for untold numbers of historic real-time strategy games to come. Coming off the successful spin-off that was Age of Mythology, Ensemble Studios is back with another installment in the series that put the developer's name on the map. Age of Empires III advances the series hundreds of years into the future, trading swordsmen and catapults for musketeers and cannons, while keeping the series' signature formula basically intact. What's more, the game features some gorgeous visuals and an interesting, inventive twist in its persistent "home city" system. So it's unfortunate that the actual meat-and-potatoes combat of Age of Empires III didn't turn out better, since what ought to be the most fun and exciting part of the game is actually the part that feels like it's seen the fewest improvements.

Make no mistake, Age of Empires III is still an impressive game overall. But fans with fond memories of the previous installment will be left feeling nostalgic for that game. Part of the reason may be purely subjective. The colonial setting of Age of Empires III, which focuses on hypothetical conflicts between European powers vying for control over the New World (that is, an unfettered North and South America), presents a subtler culture clash than, say, samurai fighting Persian war elephants. And the transition through five different ages that's presented in the game, culminating in the industrial age (when locomotives and mass production became a reality), aren't drastically different in gameplay terms, since the magic of gunpowder is available from the get-go. Nevertheless, one look at either Age III's majestic galleons firing all broadsides or horse-drawn cannons readying a deadly payload ought to be all the convincing you need that this is a welcomed direction for the series to take.

Eight different European civilizations are at the forefront of Age of Empires III, though mercenaries from other foreign nations sort of make cameo appearances, and various Native American tribes are also included. The usual suspects are here, like the British, the French, the Spanish, and the Dutch. The Russians, the Portuguese, the Germans, and the Ottomans are also available, and each has certain key differences in its economy and military leanings. These differences are significant in practice, such as how the British automatically gain additional workers when they build new houses, or how the Russians may quickly train up large numbers of light infantry. But the eight cultures' personalities don't necessarily come across in combat, because most of the units and structures unique to each side aren't so unique as to be highly distinguishable, and many units and structures are shared in common across most sides. There are certainly exceptions--the Ottomans, with their heavy emphasis on gunpowder, bring to bear some of the biggest and baddest guns in the game, for instance. And, oddly enough, British longbows seem just as surprisingly deadly here as they did in Age II. It's probably just a necessary consequence of the setting, but don't expect for Age III's factions to blow your mind by how different or unusual they are. Fortunately, each one is complex enough and seems viable enough to where it's easy to find an early favorite and want to stick with it.

Age of Empires III is every bit the fully featured game you'd expect it to be, featuring a lengthy single-player campaign in three interconnected acts, each one a generation apart. There's a fully customizable skirmish mode with five difficulty settings for the computer opponent; there's the ability to play over a network; and, of course, there's the ESOnline player-matching service, where you can compete in ranked matches over the Internet, chat with other players, and more. There's also a scenario editor, in case you wish to create your own maps or campaigns, plus some encyclopedic information about all the game's units, structures, cultures, circumstances, and more. A tutorial is there to teach you the basics, and you can also play a practice match in which a fairly helpful narrator will gently remind you of the stuff you're basically forgetting to do.

When you get right down to it, Age of Empires III plays a lot like Age II. It's been simplified in a number of ways that fans of the past game will quickly notice and mostly appreciate, but the overall flow of gameplay remains very similar. You're put in charge of a fledgling colony in the New World, and you must deploy workers from your town center, who may build new structures and harvest the game's three resources: food, wood, and coin. Stone, which was a fourth resource in Age II, is no longer a factor, and you don't have to worry about creating resource drop-off sites this time around (settlers sent to chop wood, for instance, will just chop away without ever heading back to a town center or lumberyard). A marketplace structure centralizes economic upgrades, and mills and plantations can be built to produce an infinite supply of food and coin, respectively. So later on in a match, you can safely stop worrying about micromanaging your resource gathering--at least until your foes swoop in and damage your economic foundation.

Meanwhile, additional houses must be built to support a growing population, and walls and defensive structures may be used to repel guerilla tactics. Military forces mainly consist of infantry, cavalry, and artillery, and they're trained from separate structures. Most military units can be queued up five at a time, so rather than produce musketeers one by one, you can build a group--provided you have the resources. Presumably this is so you can quickly marshal some defenses if caught off guard, but it's strange that the same amount of time is needed to train one soldier as is needed to train five. You can effectively get an interest-free loan by training your first troop, then waiting until he's almost ready before quickly queuing up four more.

Seven Kingdoms: Conquest

The resurrection of an old game franchise is never without pitfalls, and Seven Kingdoms: Conquest seems to plummet into just about every one of them. Enlight Software's latest has nothing to do with the historical-strategy epic that turned a lot of heads back in 1997, and has moved from a complex empire builder to a simplistic, fantasy-oriented real-time strategy game that pits humans against demons. Beyond that, the game is clearly unfinished and has a tremendous number of serious bugs, few strategic choices during gameplay, and campaign missions that amount to nothing more than skirmishes by different names.

Instability is the biggest problem. Seven Kingdoms: Conquest is, to use the technical term, buggy as hell. Just getting the game to start is a challenge, and glitches can bring everything to a halt at any time. Not only did every one of these frequent lockups require an Ctrl-Alt-Del escape to the Windows desktop, but they also seemed to cause some sort of lasting graphical corruption that prevented a successful restart of the game. The game would load, but with a black background screen in the main menu and lots of visual artifacts and stuttering music. Only a full uninstall and reinstall got the game working again...at least until the next big crash.

Other serious problems plague the game even if you get it running properly for a few minutes. The human tutorial mission is so messed up that it's unplayable due to scripting errors, such as a gate that refuses to open. Some campaign and skirmish missions with annihilation as the objective can't be won even if you wipe out all of your enemies. Pathfinding is awful for the most part, which means that units easily get stuck behind buildings. And any sort of adjustment to the visual settings seems to cause the game to crash even sooner than it usually would. This actually serves as a kind of trap, given that you're bound to go into the video-options screen eventually in search of a way to improve the gloomy, horrifically pixelicious visuals, or at least to change the default resolution to something supporting widescreen monitors. (Don't bother, the game's limited to 1024x768 and 1280x1024.) To make a long story short, wait for the patch.

Or not. There isn't much here worth hanging around for, actually. Although the original two games in this franchise were hardcore strategy epics that blended real-time battles with intricate empire management and economics, Seven Kingdoms: Conquest is a generic RTS that pits humans against demons, and it features generic resource gathering and base building. You don't even get to play with the seven kingdoms that gave the franchise its name. Instead of the partially realistic, diverse ancient powers that gave the first game its depth, such as the Chinese and the Persians, you're stuck with a handful of nearly identical human factions given historical names such as Hittites and Saxons. The only appreciable difference between these nations is the visual appearance of units in the interface. (As an example, Egyptian troops wear those famous desert headpieces.) Troop and building options change as you move forward from the starting Early Bronze Age through the closing Middle Age, but even then it's not as if you're thrown any curveballs. Bowmen turn into crossbowmen, and catapults become trebuchets--that sort of thing. At any rate, the human factions play the same no matter what age you're currently undergoing.

Stereotypical characteristics such as flame, ice, plague, and shadow make the seven demon-realm factions more interesting, but there isn't much to choose from no matter what faction you're commanding. Admittedly, some of the monsters are pretty cool in an old-school D&D fashion, given that you have the ability to summon troops like yeti, plague demons, and naga. Nevertheless, each realm uses the same two basic units, larvae and succubi, and you get only a handful of unique options to choose from when building the unit-summoning hellgates. Resource gathering has a more intriguing, darker vibe, although collecting the blood needed to summon monsters is about as creepy as pumping oil, and the facilities that gather stone are just mines under the spookier name of "stone shrines." Monotony grows fast.

Game options do nothing to alleviate this sense of boredom. The human and demon campaigns consist of skirmish missions given opening screens and voice-over intros that recount soldiers' diaries. The voice acting is surprisingly good considering the low-budget nature of the game, although the gritty effect is ruined when these first-person accounts wrap up with mention of dates like "756 BC." Uh-huh. At any rate, the "campaign" missions all task with you building up a base, cranking out troops, and killing everything in sight. The actual skirmish missions do the same, but they're a little better than the campaigns because you at least have the option to pick a faction to play, along with your opponents, a map, and the starting age. You just can't take skirmishes online, at least not without knowing an opponent's IP in advance, because there is no matchmaking service.

Gameplay in both modes rarely varies from the RTS formula, with the only real difference being the need to deal with neutral villages and cities. Maps are dotted with these settlements, which can be attacked or brought over to your side with human ambassador or demon succubi units. Not that you ever really need to resort to diplomacy. The AI is so incompetent that it never mounts anything resembling a reasonable attack or defense, particularly in larger maps. Enemy cities will crank out troops, but they're sent on what seem to be mindless raids against you and the odd neutral village, more like they're pillaging marauders than a coherent army in the field. Computer-controlled foes also never seem to bother with the monster-guarded treasure hordes and demonstones (mana-providing resources) scattered around the maps.

Essentially, Seven Kingdoms: Conquest is a disaster in just about every imaginable fashion. A few patches may yet round it into some kind of playable shape, but right now this is simply another cookie-cutter RTS loaded with serious bugs and unfulfilled potential.

SunAge

Al Gore's darkest dreams have nothing on SunAge. This real-time strategy game from Vienna-based Vertex4 takes place in a future when Earth has been turned into a crispy fritter by a combination of global warming and centuries of war. But this forward-looking setting is hampered by the presence of dozens of crippling bugs and screwups, such as no multiplayer support on launch despite promises to the contrary. Add in a backward design that was last in vogue when people were still freaking out about what Y2K was going to do to airplanes, and you've got an RTS that couldn't be more offensive if it came to your house and kicked your dog.

SunAge was released in a spectacularly unstable state that included the gold standard of bugs: crashes that corrupted save files and sent you right back to square one. Other major flaws included the game's refusal to start after installation, mission-breaking scripting errors, absurdly long saving and loading times, and the complete absence of the multiplayer modes plugged right on the back of the game box. A series of patches now up to version 1.08 have made the game much more stable and have added the MIA multiplayer, but there are still loads of major bugs. Troops regularly stop responding to commands and sometimes move off in a random direction after being selected with a single mouse click. Buildings occasionally can't be placed, even in apparently clear areas. Mission objectives are regularly impossible to complete. Previously explored areas are lost in saves, so every time you load a game you've got to start peeling back the fog of war all over again. This game was obviously kicked out the door way too soon, which is awfully odd because it was apparently in development for about 11 years.

Even if we could venture to a fairy-tale land where SunAge is bug-free, the dull design wouldn't win it many fans. This is an old-fashioned three-civilization RTS like Blizzard used to make, with the nice-guy human Federals, the evil mutant Raak-Zun, and the neutral robotic Sentinel factions being about as bland as minute rice. Aside from the mild innovation of making the Raak-Zun dependent on slaves, the three sides offer no surprises. This is deeply derivative RTS gaming, where you build bases, scrounge for resources, and grind out generic troops and tanks and aircraft for use in nonstop mindless battles.

And "mindless" really is the key word. Combat is a blend of the dumb and the obtuse. Head-on tank rushes are your main pastime, given the general absence of anything like terrain or a sensible rock-paper-scissors formula. The AI always attacks full-out, charging your troops no matter what, so all you can do is respond in kind. As in all the best old-time RTS games, this sort of mayhem is oddly satisfying. But it isn't mixed up with even the slightest bit of tactical thinking, unless you're figuring out how to navigate the often mazelike maps. So after a couple of missions, the gameplay becomes as monotonous and predictable as the ticking of a metronome.

Battles also feel clunky due to a bizarre design choice to take firing orders away from you. Instead of right-clicking on enemy troops to get the guns blazing as in almost every other RTS ever made, here you have to move your troops within range of the bad guys to make them open fire. Also, your troops don't automatically follow enemies once battles have started, which turns many battles into irritating chase sequences where you have to run after enemies to keep them in firing range. It's hard to understand what Vertex4 was trying to accomplish here. There aren't any obvious pluses to making this drastic change to such a longstanding RTS convention, so this offbeat movement mechanism will only frustrate players.

Virtually all of SunAge's frills are as ineptly handled as the core game design. While the music is stark and ominous, the visuals are absent any personality. Buildings and troops lean on a standard RTS style that's about as distinctive as blades of grass. Cutscenes are even more amateurish, thanks to the worst comic art this side of early '90s Marvel. Gameplay options are just about worthless beyond the three solo campaigns played from the perspective of each race. You can skirmish against the AI only by hosting a multiplayer game and choosing computer opponents, which doesn't give you the option to save progress. And the actual multiplayer involves free-for-all and team games limited to just four players (which isn't much of a problem, actually, since there are never more than a couple of people hanging out in the online lobby).

Trudging through a game like SunAge is painful at best. Retro-RTS gaming is a great idea if you're into nostalgia, but the number of bugs and design miscues make this one an uncomfortable trip back in time.

Command & Conquer 3: Kane's Wrath

Last year's Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars featured a horde of freaky alien units, hammy acting, and lots and lots of explosions. With Kane's Wrath, Electronic Arts provides freakier aliens, hammier acting, and bigger explosions, and mixes them into an expansion pack that doesn't improve the core game in any meaningful way. Of course, it gives us more ways to experience the terrific gameplay, and for that we can be grateful. Nevertheless, Kane's Wrath misses the mark in many ways and comes across as a wasted opportunity

The story, such as it is, fills a number of gaps in Command & Conquer history, jumping around like a jackrabbit on speed. For example, the first act takes place between the second and third Tiberium Wars, whereas the second act jumps to events that took place during C&C3. As a result, when Kane and other characters address you during the live-action cutscenes, you're not even the same character each time. Joe Kucan as Kane, God bless him, almost saves this scattershot structure with his usual superb mix of spittled monologues and ominous glares. As Alexa, though, actress Natasha Henstridge misses the whole point by misunderstanding the difference between histrionics and plain bad acting. Her bouncy hairdo is more energetic than she is. We expect cheese in a Command & Conquer campaign, but its taste is altogether overpowering here. With the third act, Kane's Wrath starts hitting the right notes and then comes to a halt, leaving the promise of yet another expansion...the same promise Tiberium Wars left with us. Let's hope that the inevitable second expansion pack makes good on it.

Once you take command of the battlefield, things pick up, but not in the ways you might expect from an expansion pack. You play as the Nod faction through the whole of the 13-mission campaign, which is fine, but it fails to capitalize on the pitifully brief Scrin campaign of Tiberium Wars. Nevertheless, this is at heart the same gameplay that made last year's game such a success. It's fast-paced, fun, and eminently playable. When the game emphasizes these strengths, such as in a mission where you have to capture a GDI researcher, the gameplay soars. Other missions just speak to overlooked possibilities. For instance, in one scenario, you're teased with the possibility of experiencing one of Tiberium Wars' best missions from the perspective of a different commander. But rather than delivering on the promise of a heart-pounding battle, the game whips the rug out from under you, and you get stuck using a commando and saboteur--and then a dinky attack bike. Talk about an anticlimax.

Thankfully, all of the issues that the campaign presents are mostly offset by the variety of new toys available. Many of them come courtesy of the subfactions in Kane's Wrath. You can still play skirmishes against other players and the AI as the standard GDI, Nod, and Scrin factions, and they've seen some minor changes. However, you should check out the subfactions if you want access to the best goodies. For the most part, the subfactions aren't radically different from their vanilla counterparts, but they bring some subtle and interesting additions and changes to the battlefield nonetheless. For example, the Nod subfaction called the Black Hand replaces the avatar warmech with a flame-spewing monstrosity called the purifier. The Black Hand has no flying units, though, so this isn't the faction for you if you like to spam venoms. Other tweaks have very little impact, such as the addition of shields to harvesters of the Reaper-17 Scrin subfaction, though such small changes undoubtedly have effects on the overall balance.

Some of the new units are available to the main faction and subfactions alike. For example, all GDI players get the hammerhead helicopter, which is invaluable for troop transport and can stay aloft for a while without having to refuel. The Scrin mechapede is a particular (and slightly overpowered) favorite, given that you can extend its length by adding pods to it, and there are four different types of pods you can use. This flexibility makes the mechapede one of the most versatile units in the game, but in the spirit of the Scrin, it requires a healthy amount of micromanagement. The most superficially dramatic units are the new epic units. Each faction and its subfactions get access to a new powerful unit: the MARV tank in the case of the GDI, the redeemer for the Nod, and the eradicator hexapod for the Scrin. How important they are to your strategy depends on how long your matches draw out, which is always a crapshoot in the rush-heavy Command & Conquer. However, should you get to the point where you can create one, you'll enjoy the additional help it provides on the battlefield. They have powerful attacks (even more powerful if infantry is garrisoned inside), but their other abilities can be helpful as well. For example, if you need extra credits, just drive your MARV over some Tiberium, and it will be added to your coffers instantly.

And in a sign that Electronic Arts kept throwing different things at Command & Conquer 3 to see what would stick, they've introduced Global Conquest, which is a Risk-inspired turn-based mode similar to the ones in Rise of Nations or Dawn of War. In it, you create strike forces that let you expand across the globe to crush your enemies while exerting influence on cities. It's an interesting diversion, but it's esoteric without having the depth to match. Not only is the gameplay diluted compared to other turn-based games, but the world map isn't separated into distinct areas, which diminishes the thrill of expansion. It feels as if you're trying to take over vast tracts of empty land, and without the geographic and visual divisions you'd expect, you never get that "just...one...more...turn..." compulsion.

There are more than 25 new maps to skirmish on, too, against either other players or the AI. All these additions--new units, a new mode, and so on--add more ways to play, but they don't add up to an essential expansion pack. It all makes for a broader package, but not necessarily a better one. Sure, the new subfactions give you more variety, but not every addition is significant, and in some cases, they're underwhelming (Steel Talon subfaction, this means you). Throw in a competent campaign, and you have a good expansion that should have been much, much better.

XIII Century: Death or Glory

Calling XIII Century: Death or Glory a poor man's take on the Total War series may seem like a condemnation of this tactical RTS with mere faint praise. But even though this compendium of great medieval battles might not be as all-encompassing as its big brothers from Creative Assembly, first-time developer Unicorn Games Studios has put together a challenging historical warfare simulation with outstanding depth. It feels a little stripped down when it comes to frills and extra gameplay options, although the game has it where it counts if all you're interested in is pitting your mettle and might against enemy generals on the battlefield.

There actually isn't much here aside from you going all medieval on the computer's posterior. XIII Century swaps the stereotypical grand campaign where you rule an empire for "campaign light" mission packs where you fight alongside the medieval armies of England, France, Germany, Russia, and the Mongolian hordes of Genghis Khan. Each of these collections features five separate historical battles that you unlock one by one. So the English start with Evesham then move on to Falkirk, Conwy, Lincoln, and Lewes. The Russians fight at Yaroslav, Torchev, Lake Peipus, Rakovor, and Lipitsa. The French take to the bloody fields of Taillebourg, Muret, Tagliarozzo, Benevento, and Bouvines. And so on. You get a pretty comprehensive tour of all the 13th-century hot spots by the time you work your way through all five nations and a set of bonus battles that open up as your rank grows through winning battles.

All this might seem a bit on the skimpy side to anyone coming off of an overwhelming epic like Medieval II: Total War. But since the battles here are so thoroughly depicted, it's hard to quibble with the warfare-centric focus. For starters, XIII Century is tough. Battles are founded on a rigorous rock-paper-scissors formula, so you can't just lumber about and rush foes with no consideration as to their relative strengths and weaknesses. This isn't a simple formula, either. Although many basics are in play here (keep cavalry away from pikemen, keep archers on high ground, that sort of thing), unit statistics are heavily detailed. This gives you a lot to keep track of during battles, which tend to fly by even at regular speed, but at least the interface provides ready access to everything you need to know. Moving the mouse cursor over unit formations provides banks of numbers detailing morale, number of wounded, whether or not the flanks and rear are covered, and so forth. So you can get instant snapshots of how your troops are faring when things are going hot and heavy, which lets you keep pace and give the right commands at the right times.

Stats aren't much help when it comes to dealing with battlefields, though. Maps here are so intricately detailed that you have to use the terrain to your advantage in order to have a chance at victory, even if the odds are heavily in your favor. Each is packed with hills that provide great positions for archers, paths that allow cavalry units to pull off sneaky flanking maneuvers, rivers that let you set up almost impregnable defenses, and so forth. Having to take the lay of the land into account before giving even the most basic order really enhances the realism of medieval warfare, and underlines how battles can turn on presumably minor issues such as how well a general uses a hill. Beautiful, detailed graphics really bring these backgrounds to life, too. Panning around during battles reveals postcardlike vistas of hills, mountains, and rivers, along with the rather incongruous (if majestic) sight of soldiers in full armor.

Cunning artificial intelligence makes the challenge presented here even stiffer. Enemy forces know the rock-paper-scissors formula well and use it to pull off some truly stunning attacks. Expect any and all openings to be exploited, so be sure not to leave any archers uncovered by heavy ground troops or enemy cavalry will decimate them in moments. One mistake can easily cost you a battle, even if it looks like you're presiding over a triumphant rout. Defenses are also adroitly handled by the AI. Even if you execute a brilliant plan that catches the enemy off-guard, computer-controlled forces tend to launch counters that can turn things around in the blink of an eye. Battles can't be won on one or even two astute maneuvers, so you have to string together a full series of smart moves to emerge victorious. It's astonishing how well computer armies rally from serious setbacks, regularly bouncing off the canvas from even crushing blows like having archers slaughtered by a sly flanking cavalry charge.

As good as XIII Century is on the battlefield, it doesn't offer all that much off of it. Only the Custom Battle mode is a worthwhile addition to the campaigns, as it lets you set up battles with more than a dozen nations and family factions and buy armies with set starting amounts of cash. Multiplayer is something of a lost cause at present, as it supports only direct IP connections (although a patch providing access to a matchmaking server is apparently in the works). And the visuals and sound are a bit on the wonky side, with occasional frame-rate hitches and sharp pops whenever you get into heavy battles with hundreds of units onscreen at once. The game can become nearly unplayable very fast when this happens, which can sabotage your ability to control battles.

Still, XIII Century: Death or Glory provides a deep, challenging taste of medieval warfare even with its singular focus on the field of battle. That might not be enough for some strategy gamers, although anyone with a mind for military tactics should appreciate this exacting look at one of history's bloodiest centuries.

For a game franchise nudging the two million mark in total sales, Sudden Strike doesn't get a whole lot of respect. But the latest addition to the family might just turn things around, thanks to new epic-scale battles and an intensity unmatched by its predecessors. Sudden Strike 3: Arms for Victory remains a long way from tactically minded World War II real-time strategy perfection, and it needs some serious battlefield refinements before entering the big leagues, but this is still the best game in the history of the series.

Scale is what really differentiates Arms for Victory from the first two games in the series and their expansion packs. Whereas the WWII battlefields re-created in the earlier games could be conquered in no more than a couple of hours, the scenarios here are absolutely massive. You still don't have to worry about any base-building, given that gameplay is a straight-up tactical blitz of ordering around troops and tanks as well as calling in artillery fire and bombing runs. But each of the campaign missions and the one-off custom scenarios depict hundreds of square miles of terrain occupied by hundreds if not thousands of troops, tanks, trucks, and artillery, making for lengthy, amazingly intense battles that can take full evenings of play to finish.

Battles now consist of multiple stages that take you from the initial moments of an assault through numerous objectives, such as taking out German artillery on D-Day, helping the British at Sicily, and helping the Russians steal from German supply depots before demolishing a train yard. Terrain features are also realistically modeled. Instead of blitzing from one end of a map to the other, you now have to take into account geographical complications. Maps are gorgeous, with intricately modeled trees, muddy turf, murky swamps, and so forth, but the real impact is on tactical considerations. Enemies can hold the high ground on hills, necessitating a tough decision on whether to head up with a frontal assault or try to go around them. Artillery buried in a forest can force you to consider an armor attack or one of those precious, limited air strikes (which may not even be a sensible option if the enemy still has AA guns in operation). And swamps can stop an advance dead in its tracks; the muck bogs down tanks and heavy vehicles so much that you have to send troops across the terrain on foot.

This is a much more complex, strategically demanding game than previous Sudden Strikes. Unlike in earlier games in the series, which leaned on straightforward tank rushes against insane levels of enemy opposition, here the battlefield seems more level. Whereas before it seemed like the game was cheating by throwing spectacular numbers of enemies at you, now you seem to have a fair shot of winning against reasonable numbers of bad guys, at least as long as you think ahead. Long-term planning is a must on every map because you need to take into account troop strength and terrain obstacles before committing any troops to battle. Otherwise you can easily wind up sacrificing so many troops while storming beachfront fortifications that later mission objectives become impossible to pull off. It's the same deal with calling in artillery and air-strike support. Sure, you can take a "rubble doesn't cause trouble" approach in the beginning and make enemy positions look like the surface of the moon. But this will inevitably leave you empty-handed later on, when you desperately need a timely bombardment to take a hill or some other heavily defended fortification.

Unfortunately, the control system and basic game engine haven't kept pace with the expanded scope of the action in Arms for Victory. The minimalistic control scheme just isn't always up to handling troop complements this numerous spread across such huge maps. There are no formation commands for troops, no way to order them to hit the dirt, no way to even have them run or walk depending on the circumstances. Likewise, you can't separate them according to classes such as machine gunner, officer, medic, and so forth without individually selecting each soldier. So even though there is a tremendous range of troop, vehicle, and artillery types in the game, you can't fully take advantage of their specialties. All you can do is give general attack commands such as assault, attack ground, and scatter. Pathfinding is pretty much atrocious, too. Unless you keep units together by holding down the Ctrl key when issuing movement orders, troops frequently take the long way around to objectives and wind up getting ripped to shreds by enemy fire.

General lack of cohesion isn't helped much by the many battles that begin in the chaos of all-out assaults, such as beach landings. In these situations, about all you can do is band-select troops after they run off of the landing craft and throw them at dug-in enemy trenches and pillboxes, hoping for the best. Expect to do a lot of experimentation with various approaches before figuring out the smartest way to approach these maps. Real WWII battles probably really were this chaotic, but at times such a sense of realism leads to more frustration than anything else. Most battles eventually slow down and let you issue more measured troop orders, refuel vehicles, load up artillery, heal soldiers with medics, and so forth. But even then, it often seems as if you're stuck with too many troops spread over too large an area.

Many missions deal with stock WWII battles that you've no doubt fought many, many times before, with only the two Iwo Jima ones offering a dash of newness. Terrain graphics are generally sharp and attractive, as noted above, but troop animations are choppy and reminiscent of goose-stepping stick figures. Major tearing is also common whenever you scroll the map. Audio effects offer up fantastic, atmospheric battle sounds, although the use of canned unit acknowledgements that have no basis in battlefield reality ruins a lot of this effect. Hearing "It's a trap!" over and over again is awfully annoying. Finally, multiplayer is supported only via direct IP connections, so you can't go online and find cannon fodder via matchmaking servers.

Some aspects of Sudden Strike 3: Arms for Victory will no doubt turn players right off. There are some potentially serious issues here with chaos and controls. But at the same time, you get a good trade-off courtesy of huge, realistic battlefields that hammer home the epic scale of major WWII engagements in a way that isn't often shown in RTS games. That's a real plus, and this bonus makes wading through the frustrating moments worthwhile.

Riddle of the Tomb

"Ancient" describes both the setting and the gameplay of Cleopatra: Riddle of the Tomb. This adventure from French developer Kheops Studio (previously released in Europe as Cleopatra: A Queen's Destiny) never strays from point-and-click conventions, spinning a predictable yarn where you collect random pieces of junk and work out traditional puzzles involving code wheels and the like. However, an ancient Egyptian setting that feels like more than just window dressing, along with enigmas authentic to the era, make the game more playable than it would normally be in this day and age.

You take on the role of Thomas, an apprentice astrologer plying his trade in Alexandria during the civil war between Cleopatra and her brother/husband (those Egyptians really knew how to live) Ptolemy. As the city is torn apart by rioting mobs, Thomas is drawn into the fray due to the mysterious disappearance of his true love Iris and her father, chief astrologer Akkad. Cue the stereotypical adventure-game scavenger hunt, this time in search of ancient secrets that will enable Cleopatra to obtain an oracle's reading about whether or not she needs to hook up with Julius Caesar to save Egypt. Yes, seriously.

So, yeah, the plot is a bit goofy. But much of the story also rings true, due to authentic touches clipped from the history books. The plot revolves around the historic rivalry between Cleopatra and her brother that led to the queen's infamous dalliances with Rome's hottest dictators and demagogues. Greek text is used throughout the game, which is perfectly accurate for the period in question since Alexandria had been the capital of a de facto Greek state for some three centuries by this point. It was actually pretty impressive to see this touch, since most games instantly equate all things Egyptian with hieroglyphics. Many puzzles slip in ancient gadgets and geegaws such as a clepsydra water clock and ushabti funerary statues. Thomas' quests take place in legendary locations like the Pharos Lighthouse and the Library of Alexandria, all of which are brought to life with respectable, if formulaic, visuals that immerse you in a land of pyramids, sphinxes, and crocodiles. And the audio quality is generally fantastic, due to a bouncy score reminiscent of a slowed-down belly-dancing tune and atmospheric effects that take full advantage of surround-sound systems.

Only a few features are out of place. You have to pick a birth sign from the traditional 12 symbols of the zodiac at the start of the game, which seems awfully new agey in a game otherwise steeped in Egyptian history. The horoscope mechanic it governs is kind of weak, too, as whatever sign you pick determines whether you're going to have a good day and need fewer puzzle pieces, or have a bad day and need more. Much of the script and voice acting seem out of place. Too many modern phrases have crept into the dialogue (although the script is better than you're led to believe it will be by the game box, which has "Across the Scorching Red Dessert" emblazoned in huge type on the inside front flap) and the voice actors often rip through their lines as if they were late for a bus.

Gameplay in Riddle of the Tomb is more commonplace. You walk through mostly static locations with step-and-swivel movements where you walk forward to set positions and then whirl the mouse around looking for objects to play with or items to pick up. As usual with these sorts of old-school adventures, there isn't a lot of rhyme or reason to the items you collect. Basically, if you can pick it up, you'd better pick it up, even if it serves no obvious purpose at the moment. At least there are no pretensions here, though. You know what you're in for from the very first location, which is strewn with all kinds of apparently random detritus like broken sticks, buckets of tar, a leather strap, and an iron hook. From here on out you need to gather crap that litters the ground across Alexandria like some kind of an ancient environmentalist. See fillets of dried fish? Grab 'em. Run across a needle and thread? Pocket them. Spot some chain mail? Ditto.

But playing kleptomaniac actually makes sense in the context of the game. There are no tremendous leaps of logic here, just a real lack of imagination when it comes to scattering puzzle-solving paraphernalia all through the game locales. So it's generally pretty easy to figure out how you're supposed to utilize items once you have them in your possession. How to make ushabti figurines for the crazy crocodile worshipper isn't hard to determine given the nearby location of a workshop stocked with clay and a fire pit. Rubble, a chisel, and a wooden frame practically tell you how to craft a new stone ball for use in a catapult. That sort of thing. All you have to do is grab everything that isn't nailed down, take a look at your goals, and then start combining items in your inventory menu. Only the set-piece logic puzzles slow you down, and they're fairly simple to work through as long as you pick up all of the hints hidden on papyri and in wall inscriptions. Most of these brainteasers really lay on the ancient theme, too, bulking up the atmosphere with you spelling names in Greek letters, arranging god figurines to mimic the weighing of the soul ceremony performed by Anubis, and mashing up powders and plants like an alchemist.

In some ways, Cleopatra: Riddle of the Tomb proves that you don't need to reinvent the wheel. Traditional adventure games may seem awfully creaky at this late date, but there is something to be said for a new release that sticks so close to the old formula yet still manages to tell a tale that most adventurers will want to finish.