Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns

There are games that strive to do everything, attempting to please everyone at the same time. Usually though, they fail abysmally, excelling in some areas and lacking sadly in others. Kohan is one of those games, making such a halfhearted effort at every facet of gameplay that it gives you the impression the developers decided initially they wanted a game that catered for everyone, but couldn't be bothered going to all that effort and buggered off down the pub instead.

At its heart Kohan is a realtime strategy game with fantasy characters. It's not entirely dissimilar to WarCraft or Age Of Empires II, with building and resource management elements and, of course, plenty of fighting. However, it also has elements of role-play, with units gaining in experience for every kill and growing stronger, faster and generally more powerful if you can keep them alive long enough. This is a great idea in theory, except you will only keep these units for one mission, so there is no incentive to keep them alive - when you start the next mission, you just have to go through the whole process again with new units. There is resource management in the sense you have to build new components for your cities (such as barracks and blacksmiths for your military units), but the only evidence you see of this is a small icon in the city window - you don't see your new buildings on the landscape. There's even a nod to Civilization in the use of Settlers to build new cities, but in all the time I've played the game I've never had to build one. There are so many cities that are easy to capture and control in every mission you never need to build your own, which pretty much negates the need tor these units in the first place.

Simple As Pimples

Aside from I half-arsed nods at elements of gameplay from different genres, Kohan is likely to keep you mildly entertained for at least a day or two, always threatening to get better than it actually is but never fulfilling its promise. Ultimately, it's a rather simplistic RTS which follows all the rules you would expect and, as such, offers no real challenge to seasoned RTS veterans. Visually it's nothing to write home about either. It looks inferior even when compared to the original Age Of Empires, which came out years ago. In retrospect, I wouldn't be at all surprised if this game had been developed three or four years ago and has finally been given a release way after the developers originally intended. In technological terms, it plays and feels like a game that time forgot. That's not to say that Kohan is awful, it just doesn't shine when put alongside the best of the current fantasy RTS crop. It's passable, but only just.