Overview

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Feudal System

Rise of Nations is a very good conquer-through-the-ages RTS with a very boring name. Lead designer Brian Reynolds may have helped give birth to classics like Civilization II and Alpha Centauri, but he’s no hell when it comes to the Madison Avenue name game. You couldn’t come up with a safer, more generic title if you sought out the dullest nouns and pronouns in Merriam-Webster. The only benefit to the bland title is that at least people aren’t going to be misled. Anyone who carries this box to checkout has to know that the game inside features old-fashioned historical strategizing like Bruce Shelley and Sid Meier used to make.

And great tutorials, too

Boadicea, now that's original

Pesky Romans

That’s about it for the negatives. Rise of Nations may have a moniker that’s as pallid as day-old dishwater, but the gameplay is as vivid as an old Technicolor movie. Reynolds and the rest of the development team at Big Huge Games have done a fantastic job reviving the big-history RTS after the dreary snoozefest that was Empire Earth. While I love trebuchets as much as the next guy—probably more than the next guy, unless the next guy has also considered hacking together a real one out of pressure-treated wood scavenged from the crumbling deck in his backyard—it’s something of a minor miracle that any game could again get me interested in even the coolest of medieval siege weapons. I dove into this game hating even the thought of spending more hours researching the feudal system and assembling the arquebus… and surprisingly, I didn’t come up for air for many, many hours.

Derivative in All the Right Spots

The game is certainly derivative of classics like Age of Empires, though it’s derivative in all of the right spots. Basics should be as familiar as the face in the mirror to RTS veterans. There are 18 nations included, spanning human history from the ancient Romans and Greeks to comparatively modern civilizations like the British and Germans. Obscure peoples such as the Bantu, Mayans, and Nubians are featured as well. All come with special skills. The Chinese can build citizens instantly and receive free health upgrades. Russian national borders increase with each Age. Greeks have cheaper libraries and universities. Spain gets a heavy ship with each new dock. And so on. All of the bonuses nicely reflect historical realities.

City siege, circa 1400

City siege, circa 1940

Keep watching the skies!

Each nation starts as a humble village and rises through the ages to become a great power, able to do battle with the other states for dominance of the world. Farms, mines, bows, tanks, and nuclear weapons all figure into your plans at one time or another. You build, you gather resources, you trade, you research scientific and cultural technologies, you make diplomatic alliances, you declare war. You can play solo against the computer in one-off matches, start up a campaign, or go online with GameSpy Arcade in search of the deadliest game—lonesome Internet geeks with a bag of Cheetos in one hand and a water-damaged copy of The Art of War in the other. There aren’t any major surprises here for those who have even a passing acquaintanceship with this genre. If you’re somewhat in the know about the Age of Empires archetype, you can dispense with the tutorials (which are very good, incidentally) and dig into that comfortable clash of civilizations.