Realus Timus Straticus (Praetorians (PC))

Member Name: mchitty

Product:	Praetorians (PC)
Date:	15/11/08 (77 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good solid RTS game, combat focus

Disadvantages: Camera angles limited

After watching the great movie 300, for a short amount of time I set about obsessively purchasing every game / movie to do with ancient civilizations. Sad, yes... but I got some great games that I never would have played otherwise.

Praetorians was released something like 5 years ago, and it's a 3D real time strategy game based on the Roman army, that also allows you to play as other ancient civilizations such as Egyptians or good ol' rough and tumble barbarians.

I was expecting Praetorians to be a complete Age of Empires clone, but I was struck by some key differences. You can forget about micromanagement in this game, tracking your stone, gold, food and iron supplies, searching out idle villagers and sending them out to gather berries. This game is all about combat, and your resource is people.

The gameplay is fun. The focus on combat makes the game fast paced and exciting. The lack of fiddly resource management means that basically organising your troops and exploring the terrain are your top priorities. I've often found that playing games such as Age of Empires, most of my time is often spent micromanaging resources, and when I've got an army together I'll be too busy to do very much more than select it all and send it over to the enemy village.

In Praetorians, you can spend all your time sorting out your troops and making tactical decisions. Certain troops are better in certain situations, so there's almost a rock-paper-scissors dynamic going on, which means that with clever decisions you can win in situations even if you are a little bit outnumbered.

There are some pretty cool tricks too. For example, Legionnaires are able to assume the 'Turtle' formation, surrounding the unit in shields to protect against ranged attacked. Some of these tricks add an extra tactical edge, which is a nice touch.

This game came out in 2003, so of course the graphics are fairly dated. They are 3D and look quite nice, however it is impossible to rotate or tilt the camera. This means you can't really get as immersed into the action as you can in most RTS games nowadays. However, the graphics look fairly nice and run really smoothly, so if you're not bothered about the camera they do the job nicely!

Overall Praetorians is a pretty cool old RTS game. The tactical subtleties are well implemented and it's great fun to have a quick 30 minute blast of battling every now and then.

Summary: Dated, but still has its appeal!