I guess that everybody who knows something about the Ancient Greece heard about Sparta. A fierce rival of Athens, Sparta was a city where people were born and trained to fight. Ancient Wars: Sparta tries to recreate the atmosphere from those days. In addition to 300, the movie featuring the same Spartans, a glimpse of ancient Greece is revealed.

Ancient Wars: Sparta is all about war and struggle for power. The problem regarding the game is that it came at the same time with 300. If the movie recreates an excellent atmosphere, the games tries that, but fails.

If you have played RTS games over the last 5 years then you will find no problems playing this game. Sparta features 3 campaigns: the Spartans, the Egyptians, and the Persians. Each campaign will try to present the game from its point of view.

The game it's easy. As in most of the RTS games, you have resources to collect. Food, wood, and gold are your resources with gold being the most hard to find and at the same time limited. This limitation will somehow lengthen your mission as you will stay and wait for the gold to be collected. To research more advanced technologies and to erect buildings you will need lots of gold, not to mention that creating troops will leave you without gold very quick.

 

In addition to the regular resourced you collect, Sparta has another type of resources. Weapons. After each fight, the weapons of the killed units remain on the ground for a period of time allowing you or your opponents people to collect. Why collecting weapons? Because Sparta allows you to customize the troops you recruit. This particular feature allows you not to create a bunch of soldiers all the same but different types of soldiers. Swordsmen having different types of swords or shields, archers armed with bows or slinger, each soldier can be customized as you need it. And here comes the weapon problem again. As you collect weapons, they will be used on the soldiers you want to recruit. If you remain without weapons, recruiting the same soldiers will cost more gold, sometimes even three times more gold then if you assigned them a weapon. This leads to the need to fight over and over again or to quickly complete the mission.

 

At the same time, the game is very unforgiving. If you decide to play a tactic and it turns out the you made a wrong decision, the loss might turn up bad for you. The enemy will rush to destroy your city and most of the times will mean a loading game. So a saving game often is a must.

The soldiers as well as their leaders gain experience from fights. If for the soldiers this means only more hit points and more inflicted damage, for the leaders this is something more. They also gain more hit points and damage but also you can unlock some skills that will make your leader a fighting machine. They can perform special moves, allow the party to heal faster or gain experience faster, can poison their targets and make the fight easier.

 

The graphics are fair and use the new AWE (Ancient Wars Engine). The units look nice and are somehow different which adds a nice touch to the game. We have unique units for each faction but what's the use if all we do it to mass troops and wipe the floor with the enemy?

In the end, Ancient Wars: Sparta is yet another RTS game trying to introduce you to the ancient era where battles were the answer to all things. Nothing particular or impressive to it, Sparta is there just to give you one more kill them all game.

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