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Ancient Wars: Sparta is one odd duck strategy game.  It’s got a couple new ideas tacked on to a design that’s about as old as the setting for the game.  The current thirst players appear to have for all things Spartan might be enough of an enticement to try the game out.  X-Play is here to tell you not to bother.  Ancient Wars: Sparta is a pretty much a complete mess.

Insert witty reference to “300” here…

Despite the half-hearted attempt to spice things up with new ideas, Sparta is a fairly pedestrian RTS game that plays like Age of Empires minus the fun.  The single player campaigns chronicle the exploits of the Spartans, Egyptians, and Persians.  I’d tell you more about the story but to be honest the cutscenes between missions were so poorly conceived that I started skipping them after viewing about three of them.  They utilize the game engine in the most basic way.  And the voice work is so dull and poorly acted that it’s almost sleep inducing.  These scenes also move at a snails pace which turns out to be an unfortunate precursor of things to come.

Things move much more slowly in ancient times

The game portion of Sparta plays very much like a generic RTS with the speed cranked way down.  Everything you do in this game feels like it’s stuck in slow motion.  Units lumber across the map with no sense of urgency.  Just getting your army to a battle takes ages.

Building your army takes even longer.  The economy in Sparta is completely out of whack. There are three resources in the game: food, wood, and gold.  Buildings and units take a ridiculous amount of gold to produce.  The problem is that gold income is very slow and quite limited.  So you’ll have barely enough to build a modest army, let alone new structures and upgrades.

Compounding this problem is the fact that training units take far too long.  One simple foot soldier can take anywhere from thirty seconds to close to one minute to produce.  To get a sizable army you’re looking at a lot of down time.

The computer AI appears to have no such problem producing units.  During skirmish matches, even the “Easy AI” was able to counter my modest army with a slew of higher tech units.  And the AI appears to have the annoying ability to unnaturally micro its units.

Spoils of War

In an effort to add some pizzazz to the game, the developers came up with idea of scavenging the battlefield for weapons.  This ties into the ability players have to create their own units.  Once your barracks is built, you have to design a template for your soldiers.  You can outfit them with basic weapons and shields, and then as you tech-up, you can upgrade your templates as you see fit.

You worker units can be instructed to pick up any weapons found in the aftermath of a battle and bring them back to your town.  This way, you can use your enemy’s weapons against him.  Of course, in practice this all comes off as more of a pain than it’s worth.  Besides, any hope of using those nice weapons from a battle is dashed because if your enemy has better equipment, you’re probably already screwed.  He’ll be knocking at your door long before your workers get back to town with the goods.

One bright spot in all this is that players can name their soldier designs anything they want.  So at the very least, I found great joy in marching my small army of ill-equipped “Paris Hiltons” over to be slaughtered by the enemy.

A Spartan Score

Ancient Wars: Sparta just isn’t an enjoyable game.  The only reason it’s not getting one star is because technically, the game is very proficient and quite polished.  It might even be possible that with a gameplay patch, Sparta could be reasonably fun.  Out of the box, Ancient Wars: Sparta is only for super hardcore RTS fans and complete idiots.  As to what that truly means, draw your own conclusions.

Article by: Greg Bemis
Video produced by: Mark Fahey