With the extraordinary development of the games industry, developers needed to keep up with the increasing demand of gamers for more complex titles. Although the general rule of “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it” is still valid, the avalanche of clones and mediocre games have made it harder and harder for good titles to stand out among the crowd if they’re not bringing something new to the table. As a direct result, development studious started to meld different genres into games that were no longer part of a single category. Now we have 1st person shooters with RPG elements, RTS-RPG’s, real-time strategies fought from a 3rd person or 1st person perspective and so on. But creating an interesting and addictive mélange of genres isn’t for everyone, so some studious settled for cramming up a lot of features under the hood of one game, but keeping the game in a single category.

     This was the case with Rise of Nations, one of the surprise hits of 2003, which managed to receive critical acclaim for its clever interweaving of real-time strategy gameplay and elements brought over from the Civilization series. Three years have passed since then and in that time the Big Huge Games studios have been busy at work refining the RoN recipe, thus giving birth to Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends.

     Although it could be considered a sequel, apart from the name and the gameplay elements, Rise of Legends has little in common with its predecessor. In RoN we had the opportunity to witness the evolution of the human civilization from Antiquity to the Information Age, but in Rise of Legends we have a completely different story and universe. The action takes place on the planet Aio, where the Vinci and the Alin factions are fighting for supremacy, with the Vinci being the adepts of technology while the Alin use magic to its full extent. But things are about to change, as an alien vessel crash lands on the planet, and the survivors, using their advanced technology, subjugate the indigenous population, the Cuotl, and proclaiming themselves gods. The single-player campaign revolves around the Vinci inventor Giacomo, whose brother is killed by a Doge who wants to take over all the city-states that make up the Vinci nation. What follows is an adventure which will see you chasing the Doge all over Aio, to get revenge and find out about the mysterious Cuotl artifacts that have begun to surface all over the planet.

     Although the producers really tried to create a compelling and memorable single-player campaign, the biggest gripe I have with it is that the characters are made from cardboard, with little to no personality whatsoever, in contrast to those found in Starcraft or Warcraft 3. From my point of view, the large numbers of characters in the story dilutes the player’s interest for their fate. It’s true that more characters mean more heroes for you to choose from before a battle, but I believe that fewer but more developed heroes would have been more indicated. Also, the campaign is too long for its own good, even though the game doesn’t ever get too boring.