Fate of Hellas

Posted by admin on June 6th, 2008 filed in 3D, Strategy

The Greeks did great things for the advancement of civilization; they were insightful philosophers, they established one of the first real democracies and they produced some of the most imaginative storywriters. Greeks imagined a world full of gods, heroes and terrible monsters, providing us with a monumental source of inspiration for all forms of modern media, including games such as Loki, Age of Mythology and God of War, to name but a few.

However, not all Greeks were peace-loving thinkers - the warrior nation of the Spartans gave rise to many battles, providing the perfect setting for a real-time strategy game. Fate of Hellas is that RTS and was developed by the same team as brought us Ancient Wars: Sparta. Does this second outing fare better than the first and does it advance the face of gaming like the Greeks advanced civilisation? Improvements have been made, but the standard RTS formula - build this, kill that - remains unchanged, leading to a slightly dull gameplay experience.

The downfall of most RTS games is dire, uninteresting stories - a number of armies meet, they don’t like each other, so they kill each other. The story in Fate of Hellas is not far off this - the Greek states are in conflict, the Persians are coming with a huge army and some serious bloodshed is about to commence! To provide yet more carnage than two armies can dish out and since Spartans versus Persians has been done before, the developers have thrown in the Macedonians and Egyptians as playable factions as well. All this carnage and violence is bound to be bad for the side that always loses a war - Mother Earth. This degradation of the Earth and battlefield is mentioned in the two campaigns and the country where the armies collide, Hellas, is almost given a persona of its own. I really enjoyed this new twist on an unoriginal war theme, but it’s a shame that it wasn’t taken further and has no real impact on the gameplay.

Like the story, the gameplay offers few surprises; it’s mainly traditional RTS fare from start to finish. There are tutorials to explain the basics, but if you have ever played Warcraft III, Age of Empires or pretty much any RTS, all the gameplay mechanics will be instantly familiar. You begin the game with a town centre plus some slaves (basic builders, resource gatherers and workers). With a hub capable of producing an endless supply of workers, you can build farms, gold mines, stables and barracks - you’ll need lots and lots of slaves to build up a decent base and support a large enough army to crush your foes. To support that large army you’ll require plentiful resources - food to keep warriors happy, wood so you can make weapons for them and gold to pay them. In a break from tradition, how the game handles food and lack of it is innovative. If you run low on food then your troops start starving and physically losing health - making an already difficulty game even harder!

Yes, Fate of Hellas is hard - even with the enemy difficulty set to Easy! This is partly to do with the fact that troops seem to die very often - those Spartans do like to go into battle with cloaks but not much else in the way of armour. If you have a six-pack then it’s nice to show it off, but something more practical would be useful in this situation! A bigger part is the unrelenting artificial intelligence of the enemies. Once a rabble of foes spots your forces, they never give up, even moving halfway across the map to charge after you. What’s more, the enemies don’t seem to be very clever or smart when it comes to tactics. A proper commander would hide troops in strategic positions while they build up a massive army to crush you. Instead, the enemy sends a constant stream of annoying little raiding parties at your base - as soon as you get near a large enough force to consider advancing then another raiding party arrives to decimate your men. This constant rhythm - train warriors, a raiding party arrives and kills warriors, train replacement warriors - gets very tedious and annoying after a while. Being unable to make significant progress quickly, coupled with the knowledge that at any second another raiding party will arrive, makes you less and less likely to want to play on.

The music and sound effects also let the game down somewhat. The music sounds suitably ancient and changes tempo when combat is entered, but it soon becomes repetitive and annoying to listen to at its default volume. To try and lift the game from this depression, the ambient sound effects - birds tweeting, workers in buildings, sheep bleating and the lovely slosh of water as troops wade through it - are high quality and pleasing to the ears, really making you feel that you could be roaming the land of Hellas. The same can’t be said for the voice acting though, which provides very little immersion. The voices of the Spartans need to be in Latin, or at least sound like they are in Latin, instead of plain, well-spoken English.

It’s not all bad though; the controls are actually well thought out, apart from the fiddly camera rotation controls. The camera can only be rotated horizontally, which simplifies things, but you have to hold the control key and then hold the middle mouse button and then move the mouse to do it - remembering this in the heat of battle is difficult. What isn’t difficult is zooming in to almost ground level to get a closer view of the action or zooming out to a standard isometric RTS view, very similar to Warcraft III - without the Orcs, that is!

The similarity to Warcraft III reaches its most obvious in the almost identical interface at the bottom of the screen. The orders that selected units can perform are neatly arranged in a grid on the right, with an animated portrait of the unit’s face towards the centre and a minimap on the left. With all the similarity, you might start to think that Fate of Hellas is a Warcraft III total conversion - but one look at the maps the game is played on will tell you otherwise. Graphically, the game is stunning - trees shudder and leaves fall to the ground as slaves chop them down, footsteps from marching troops remain for a time, reeds sway in the wind and arrows actually stick in soldier’s bodies! Even buildings are magically brought to life; shipyards can be seen constructing mammoth ships and warriors visibly practice their combat skills inside archery ranges. Despite looking cool, an army will do its best to destroy all the buildings owned by an opposing faction in order to defeat that faction. To destroy buildings, troops throw lit torches - with amazingly realistic looking fire - gradually burning them to the ground, a welcome change from the usual repetitive whacking of other RTS games!

Another welcome change from the norm is the concept of weapon collection. Key to this idea is the fact that enemy soldiers drop their weapons and shields when they die. These discarded weapons can be collected by your slaves and taken back to your town centre for later use. The next time you click on a barracks you will be able to design a new unit type in the remarkably easy and quick to use unit designer, which allows you to outfit the new unit type with the scavenged weapons instead of having to spend resources making them! Weapon collection and unit design appears like a superb idea, but there are some problems, the biggest being that collected weapons are finite in number - once you train troops and exhaust the supply you cannot train any more of that kind of troop, yet there is nothing to tell you you’ve run out. Trying to train a soldier with no more available weapons just does nothing - no warning signs, no errors, nothing! No meaningful feedback will just leave the player confused and they may even think the game has broken - it had me fooled for a while!

A benefit coupled with the weapon collection idea is the other troop customisation features. When enemy soldiers die they don’t just drop their weapons; many soldiers are mounted on horses, steer chariots or push siege engines such as catapults around. Occasionally a lucky shot from one of your men will knock an enemy right off his horse. Without any desire for battle, the rider-less horse wanders around, munching the tasty grass below. A horse with no one watching it is fair game for all and you can actually steal it for your own men, improving their combat skills. I’ve never seen any other game were horse rustling plays a role! The same is true for chariots - kill the driver, climb aboard and hare off into the distance - who said war was fair?

War may not be fair, but you’ve certainly got plenty of it here. As mentioned before, there are four playable factions - the Persians, the Egyptians, the Spartans and the Macedonians. Each faction is entirely unique and requires their own playing strategy; for example, the Persians need a lot of gold mines early on but their troops are stronger, the Spartans can build up large armies of lightly armoured warriors quickly and usually draw first blood. There will be a lot of blood as well - the Spartans and the Macedonians each get their own medium-length campaign, lasting for ages considering the game’s difficulty. What may not prove as popular or as long lasting is the multiplayer - it’s network play only so the game cannot be played over the Internet, which is a great shame. Another disappointment is that there aren’t many multiplayer maps available - the release of a map editor would be a great benefit.

Fate of Hellas is a decidedly average real-time strategy. There are a few twists and new ideas but they rarely work well. In fact, the entire game is plagued by problems, not always recognising right-clicks and issues with troops finding their way around the map are just two that come to mind. However, if you can ignore all of this and block out the music then you are left with a reasonably enjoyable and very eye pleasing generic RTS - just don’t be surprised when the d?j? vu kicks in!