The History Channel: Great Battles of Rome

Without A Hint of shame, I'll admit that I've fallen asleep at the keyboard many times, in every case blissfully drunk and with EVE Online piping its ethereal space orchestrations into my ears and its grand vistas wavering before sliding eyes. Playing Great Battles Of Rome, despite being wired on two litres of a certain carbonated soft drink, I meandered into sleepy oblivion due to being thoroughly bored.

Clearly the title refers to the actual battles being great in the reverential way all ancient periods of organised slaughter are categorised, because the battles represented here are anything but.

Let's not mince words. The 3D camera is pointless, neither offering anything interesting to zoom into, nor any kind of tactical insight. The interface doesn't help things either, as to scroll the map you have to push the mouse to the edges of the screen as the cursor keys just rotate things, and can't be remapped. If we didn't know better, we'd suspect the game was a lazy port... Oh look, there's a PSP version available, and it says on the feature list 'intuitive user interface for PSP'.

Fight The Power

As for the so-called 'great battles', they begin with you placing your armies along the bottom of a map, setting formations and selecting hold or advance orders. Once things kick off. troop formations can't be changed, and while you can still issue orders during this real-time phase, the game favours a system where once a command is given, you have to wait for your order bar to refill like some kind of health bar. The idea behind it was obviously to simulate battlefield delay, but it comes across as arbitrary and almost ruins what's otherwise an nearaverage combat system.

Thankfully, the sword-clash sections are short (a bonus for commuters), and the post/pre-match unit set-up is actually handled quite well (ie, not shit).

Not having seen much of the History Channel's output, it would be churlish of me to suggest the game that bears their endorsement is a fitting tribute. However, on the basis of this title, I certainly have no desire to subscribe anytime soon.