You are soon thrust into the world of unit control in a scenario, and learning how to use your hero powers. From there you move on to the map view, where you choose where you send your single army next. You not only conquer to take new territory, but also to gain assets, god powers, and defend your growing unified area. On the map screen you are also able to add to the tactical power of your individual territories, add to your default scenario army, and upgrade heroes and units.

The gameplay, for the player, is not difficult to pick up. It is most of the standard features you are used to. Defend your cities, attack with heroes, make armies…all the standard RTS fare. Most regular RTS players should fall into the grind fairly easy. Watch yourself, because the gameplay can go from easy to hard in the blink of an eye. Beware those really quiet moments…they inevitably mean the computer AI is preparing something nasty for you. I spent two weeks with 3-6 hours a day of gameplay to finish the game on the default ‘moderate’ difficulty setting.

I found it annoying that you do not really get to defend your own territories if you are on the attack. The computer AI can just constantly send a stream of troops against you that your unit and building AI defenses cannot counter. One cannon can decimate your entire city with your troops taping feet on the other side, doing nothing about it. If you were looking somewhere else on the map during that, say goodbye to all your defenses. Four shots from a cannon and your turret is gone. You cannot use the same strategy against the AI, which is a pity. You cannot afford to make and waste troops like that, nor can you afford the loss of expensive defenses.

A rather annoying feature of the game is the unit costs. For each unit you construct, that includes troops and buildings, the cost becomes higher with each successive unit. I can see the intent behind the unit cost rising with each unit; however, in action this really limits your ability to make strong defenses and strong armies. You learn to make due with what you have. Sometimes you are almost relieved when you lose all of one unit and the cost goes cheap again.

Be on the lookout for an awful bug when you are attacking; some buildings do not show as visible on the graphical interface. You may get the attack icon if you mouse over them, or even the building outline if you click on it by accident; but the building itself will be totally invisible. The best clue is a change in the landform on the ground plane. If you miss one of these buildings, it will tear your formation apart from behind. The game keeps a running autosave of where a player is. It’s great if you get called away in a hurry. I had my differences with the whole system, however. I recommend that you do not rely on the “Continue Campaign” autosave. You may find your profile corrupt, as happened to me, or that you simply are back a few scenarios when you next return to the game. Also there is no easy “exit without saving” option. Annoyingly, you must “resign” the scenario (which is basically declaring yourself loser) if you wish to exit the scenario back to the main menu. Make sure you have a saved game and not an autosave at that point! Take care to not leave the game paused too long or it will go corrupt on you. You have to look long and hard for the quicksave command…it is ALT+S. The “quick” way out of any scenario is a mad dash for the scenario goal—usually one particular city. That will be the first city in the enemy's color, shown on your map at the beginning of the scenario. I finished one scenario in two minutes flat by marching my startup army across the screen and smashing the city. Early on in the game when I did not know this, my style was to buildup a massive city with tough stationary defenses, an attacking army, and a separate defending army (old RTS habits die hard…). If you are building up massive amounts of troops, the AI is also doing this. This often proves more difficult in some later scenarios, if you can even achieve this at all. The moral of the story is: know what your goals are and work towards them. Non-city goals are always shown as circles on the minimap. The sooner you get the non-city goals, the better. For some inexplicable reason, they allow the computer AI to track and move his god-powers. You do not get the same luxury. You will find yourself very annoyed when “Starbolt” follows your units around burning them like ants under a giant magnifying glass. **Sizzle!**

I first tried installing this game on my laptop, because the laptop is only about four months old and has a great graphics card. Well, that took forever, and then caused freezes and lockups immediately upon running the game. I couldn’t even download the patches. Microsoft had an unhelpful page of about thirty suggestions—none of which looked easy, definitive, or even helpfully related. So I moved on to my main PC, which is a few years older. Almost no problems after that.

Graphics are nice. There are some wonderful smoke, weather, and general particle effects that add to the ambiance of many missions. Units are interesting and innovative in their design. The heroes are unique—each has its own strengths, weaknesses, and useful qualities for the general effort of your team. Some heroes, however, are definitely more useful than others.

The middle chapter of the campaign ended up as a comedy of errors for me. Profile XML error at startup—and, pop! Your campaign save is gone. How nice. From that point on you must continue with save games until you begin a new campaign. At one point the mouse just stopped scrolling. This would not allow me to select individuals or areas. Then the escape key stopped working…so I couldn’t hit save. Quickly after that, sound died. At that point in the game, I REALLY wanted a save game. I was convinced that the autosave would return me to either the wrong point, or to the same game corruption. I was very angry and had to do a manual reboot. Amazingly, the autosave came through for me in that one instance.

At one point, the game broke my video card. The game put the video to 640 x 480 x 4 (4 bits, yay!) and locked it there. It would not even allow me to shutdown my own computer. I had to hard reboot. The game was mostly ok when I returned. The game is aggressively “bring to front,” so much so, that if it locks up on you, CTRL+ALT+DEL will not come up where you can see it. Even ALT+F4 brings up an ingame dialog box instead of just killing the process. For me, that is just a little too much game control over the computer operating system.

The storyline is interesting, though forced in a few places. Even when the game was over I was wondering about the relevance of earlier cutscene revelations. So much was unexplained or unexplored. Almost as if they planned a sequel… Unfortunately, much of the early cutscene characterization and dialog is childishly silly. At the end of the second act, the fight cutscene is absolutely awesome! But at the beginning of the third act, having to choose between allies is an ugly choice. I hated having to choose, and also not being able to save just before that point or at that point.

Despite all my negative comments, I would highly recommend this game. It was fun. It had its moments of irate cursing as well…but I think every RTS will cause those. I really wished I could explore fully the technology tree of unit upgrades…but you were relatively limited in what you could afford. /me needs a Deathsphere! I would play the game again—in fact I just did play the opening board again to refresh my memory. Wow, somehow I managed to lose this time around.