Ancient Conquest

DEVELOPER : Mega Media
PUBLISHER : Re:Action

 

System Requirements Pentium 133MHz, 32MB RAM

Recommended Pentium 166MHz, 32+ MB RAM

Summary
Pros: Unique mythological setting, emphasis on ship combat Cons: Short single-player campaign, weak gameplay, poor audio
Interface : 6	Gameplay : 5	Graphics : 5
Audio : 4	Multiplayer : 6	Overall : 5.2

When I was a little kid, my parents took me to go see Jason and the Argonauts at the drive-in theater. While not exactly up to the special effects standards of The Matrix or The Phantom Menace, I thought it was pretty cool at the time. When I saw some clips of the movie on television recently, I couldn’t help but think that those special effects didn’t age well at all. Unfortunately, computer games don’t always age that well either. What used to be ground-breaking yesterday is probably going to be passé tomorrow. Ancient Conquest, from Re:Action and Megamedia Australia, is a good example of this: a plain real-time strategy game that can’t even pretend to compete with what is on the market today.

Ancient Conquest, instead of taking the tried-and-true Tolkienesque route of orcs and elves, delves into Greek mythology for its inspiration. The main story arc takes place during the quest for the famous Golden Fleece. For those of you that don’t have your copy of "Mythology for Dummies" lying around handy, the Golden Fleece was the skin of Hermes’ winged ram Chrysomallus. Jason and the crew of his ship, the Argo, went off in search for it at the behest of Jason’s uncle Pelias.) This was really a wild goose chase so that Jason would get killed and Pelias would get the kingdom but that’s not really mentioned in the game. Such is life.

Ancient Conquest takes the usual harvest/build/attack paradigm of most RTS games. In Ancient Conquest, you harvest amber and fish for the resources you need to build your fighting force. After you get enough resources, you can improve your technology and increase your navy to go forth and destroy your enemy. If you’ve ever played any RTS game before, you get the drift.

An interesting feature in Ancient Conquest is the complete absence of ground units. All your units in the game besides buildings are naval units. Even the "armies" that you can build are based on ships and cannot cross over land. Because of this, you have to play attention to how your ships are outfitted. You can choose from several types of ships, including ramming ships, meant to sink enemy ships by ramming, "man killer" ships which destroy an enemy crew, to boarders which can grapple with and take over an enemy ship. If you like, you can customize the mix of archers, spearmen, and swordsmen to make you ship better at long- or short-range crew combat or your catapults and ballistas for ship-to ship combat.

In addition to the standard enemies, there are other foes based on classical Greek mythology, such as Amazons, Minotaurs and so on. These are usually only minor annoyances because they are usually just based in a certain place and can be removed by destroying the Gauntlet-like "monster generator" that keeps spawning them. Oddly enough, I kept harvesting amber in range of several Amazons with no damage being done to my defenseless boat.

Unfortunately, many of the innovations in RTS games of the past couple of years didn’t make it through to Ancient Conquest. The game come closely resembles Warcraft or Warcraft 2 than any of the games that have improved upon the RTS genre since. The extremely short single-player campaign consists of "find x, kill all the bad guys on the map." There are also a few instant action-type missions, which are all "kill everything on the map."

The graphics are standard 2D with sprites -- it makes you wonder why a P133 is required, when the graphics are marginally better than Warcraft 2 or Command and Conquer. The music is this odd, out-of-place techno-synthesizer stuff that you’ll be turning off as soon as you can.

Multiplayer is average but not outstanding. Multiplayer is supported, but Re:Action didn’t really go to any trouble in setting up a multiplayer matching service like other companies (Blizzard, Microsoft, etc.) have done. They do say several times in the manual and on the box that multiplayer is supported through KALI (of course, every game that has IPX is supported through KALI, so what’s the big deal?). Since there aren’t any new innovations in this game, I doubt anyone will be in a hurry to stop playing their favorite RTS game to play Ancient Conquest online.

Is Ancient Conquest worth your gaming dollar? Only if you fall into one of two groups: if you positively must play every RTS out there or if you’re so enamored with Greek mythology that that novelty will carry the entire game for you. Otherwise, stay away from this Warcraft rehash. A plain vanilla RTS game just isn’t worth the time anymore.

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Reviewed by Ed Sherman