During this game's time, there were few real-time strategy games that can boast of splendid 3D graphics; having to have many models on-screen is not an easy design to pull off. When Armies of Exigo introduced itself into the RTS scene, it wowed many with its splendid graphics, which made use of advances in 3D graphics techniques, such as normal mapping (which is an illusion of complex shapes), which were (somewhat) new at the time.
However, the actual gameplay of Armies of Exigo did not benefit from the same amount of effort that went into the game's graphics; much of it has been inspired by what prominent members of its genre has already done before, and it tries to put a veneer on this with said graphics.
Furthermore, its writing will never approach the calibre of any of the established high-fantasy RTS franchises, and may also seem like wasted potential – all the more so as during the run-up to the release of this game, the game was promoted as supposedly doing what previous RTS games had not achieved.
Armies of Exigo's settings are of course high-fantasy. Although the use of this theme is not apprehensible, the overarching plot of the game may well be. It concerns two races – one obnoxiously civilized, one stubbornly savage – that have had a feud with each other for a long time; this is an old and typical cookie-cutter plot element. Then, otherworldly interlopers are introduced into the plot as a mutual threat to said two races, which then band together to defeat the invaders; this is yet another narrative trope.
Of course, one can argue that these are workable plot elements, but they need to have gripping writing to make them more worthwhile than so many other stories that use the same elements. Unfortunately, Armies of Exigo does not have that, and to compound its weakness, the presentation of its story is marred by lackadasical voice-acting and dialogue lines too. These will be elaborated later, when associated aspects of the game are described.
The game has a tutorial that describes to the player the overarching gist of the gameplay; this is of course the usual building of bases, harvesting of on-map resources and raising of armies – all are gameplay that once permeated the RTS subgenre. Players who are familiar with the Warcraft franchise and the many other franchises that were inspired by it would be quite familiar with this already.
There may be three factions in the game that are different from each other, but all of them use the same resources: gold, wood and gems. All of them exist as resource nodes in the game world, which is another typical design convention. The first two would be very familiar as they are common to strategy games with high fantasy themes. The third is typically one additional resource type that is utilized as a tool to balance units and upgrades.
Speaking of units, all units have the usual statistics that act as measures of their capabilities, such as hitpoints, damage output, mana and armor. Some have special abilities or spells that give them more tactical value than being just another grunt on the battlefield. These statistics and orders that the player can give them are presented through a graphical user interface that veterans of Warcraft and Warcraft-inspired games would be familiar with, e.g. a pad of keys at the bottom right, a mini-map that assists navigation through the map and such.
The player controls units and buildings much like he/she does in many other high-fantasy RTS games. If there is any convincing innovation that Armies of Exigo has, it is the inclusion of a few options for tweaking the controls for the game. The most prominent of these is the option to set right-mouse clicks as attack-move orders by default, which is a pleasing convenience.
The single-player portion of the game consists of three campaigns that are meant to be played consecutively as they are linked via narrative; each campaign in turn is associated with one of the three factions, and the early levels for each campaign serve to introduce the idiosyncrasy of each faction.
Long-time RTS fans would be having more than a sense of déjà vu already. Of course, one can argue that some very good RTS games have very similar single-player campaign designs, but these games were good for reasons that Armies of Exigo does not have, namely worthwhile writing.
Each campaign starts and ends with CGI cutscenes, which are certainly impressive-looking and –sounding. However, the screen-writing for them is ham-fisted at best and some cutscenes are inconsequential to the overarching plot, giving the impression that Black Hole Entertainment made CGI cutscenes because it can.
The first campaign showcases the Empire, which is a familiar conglomeration of humanoid races, namely the Humans and variants of Tolkien-envisioned Elves and Dwarves, with some Gnomes included to round up the usual menagerie of goodly races. Despite being touted as the faction that would be the most familiar to high-fantasy RTS veterans, the Empire has some peculiar designs; some of which are interestingly rare.
One of the Empire's unit-production buildings, the Barracks, can be upgraded to train not just one, but two units at a time. This is not a new design of course, but it is a very rare one because of the technical and gameplay-balance hurdles to be overcome.
Many Empire buildings can be garrisoned by units, which can then shoot out of said buildings; this includes the Empire's core defensive building, the Tower. Again, this is not a new design, but it does make Empire bases a bit easier to defend than the other factions', which contributes to the Empire's differentiation from the other factions.
All Empire combat units appear to be able to gain experience from slaying enemies and subsequently gain levels, which make them stronger and more valuable. Moreover, some units gain Aura abilities at higher levels of experience, which make the Empire army more powerful overall. Auras from multiple units do not stack, but the redundancies make the bonuses from the Auras more difficult to be dispelled by enemies.
By the time of this game, many developers of RTS games have implemented restrictions on how many workers can be assigned to the building of a structure, after having considered the ramifications to gameplay balance from having multiple worker units speed up the construction of bases. Most allow only one worker per building, and Armies of Exigo appears to be one such game. However, perhaps in an attempt to placate those who long for the days of yore when the designs for worker units can be exploited for gameplay advantages, the developers have included an upgrade option that allows for up to five Empire workers to work on a single construction project, though with the drawback of additional costs.
After completing the Empire campaign, the player is introduced to the Fallen, the definite villains of the canon behind this game; this transition would seem all too familiar to a veteran of RTS games.
Anyway, the Fallen are otherworldly creatures that fans of Cthulu mythos would not be strangers to. However, to inject some variety into their roster of units, the story has them meeting up with the more insidious denizens of Exigo to fulfill dastardly pacts and strike alliances.
The first advantage that the Fallen has for being otherworldly is that they bring along arcane technology and sorcery, an example of which is their very cheap and upgradeable Lightning Spires. This makes their defences a lot easier to manage than the others.
The designs for the workers of the Fallen faction may cause some contention among veterans of the high-fantasy RTS genre. This is because they happen to be a bit too similar to the designs used for the workers of the Undead Scourge in Warcraft III. Of course, one can say that imitation is a form of flattery, though to Armies of Exigo's credit, it does not use exactly the same designs that Warcraft III has and also introduces some innovations of its own.
For one, the Harvester unit, which is one of the two worker units that the Fallen has, is purely a resource-harvesting unit, which is dull; it does not appear to have capabilities for other roles. However, it is very tough, and a cheap upgrade gives them the ability to hold onto individual enemy units until help comes over to hem them in; this makes them very dangerous targets for early-match raids.
The other worker unit, simply called the Summoner, has the roles of building-builder and population cap booster, but has to assume forms that do either but not both. This puts the player in the uncomfortable position of having to decide whether to create Summoners to build more buildings or to increase the population cap, in the early stage of a match or mission. (The transformations are reversible though, fortunately enough.)
On the other hand, in the population-cap raising form, the Summoner duplicates and reflects damage that is inflicted on it back to its attacker, though it is still damaged anyway. The Summoner can also provide line of sight not just in the map layer that it is in, but also the other one. (There will be more on map layers later.)
The Fallen has to build their buildings on altered terrain, not unlike certain factions in Blizzard Entertainment's RTS games. Of course, one can say that this game design had been around for a long, long time in strategy games (as old as the SimCity games, for example), but Armies of Exigo may not have gameplay-balance considerations in mind.
To elaborate, the Fallen can build the Deformer building, which alters terrain, almost anywhere; they do not need to build these on already deformed terrain. This design can be exploited to deny resource nodes to the enemy temporarily, which can be a pain to deal with in multiplayer. It also allows for easy set-up of forward bases for Fallen players, as deformed terrain heals Fallen units and the Deformers themselves can be upgraded to become anti-air defences that also happen to slow down air units that they are attacking; this can be further bolstered by supporting them with Lightning Spires.
Fallen units can gain experience, but only if a specific building known as the Soultrap has been built; the Fallen player can lose all experience gained if he/she loses this building, and has to start over from scratch, which can be a chore. On the other hand, all Fallen units gain experience regardless of which killed which enemy. Such designs are interesting, but lead to gameplay balances that swing wildly between in favour of the Fallen player and his/her opponents, depending on how well the Fallen player can hide and/or protect his/her Soultrap from the attention of enemies.
The early-game Fallen units have some versatility that may cause some early-game imbalance in matches. For example, the Stingers, which are otherwise ground-bound units, can be upgraded (with reasonably cheap costs) to gain the ability to toggle flight on or off; this allows them to get onto high ground or cross chasms, as well as to alternately attack land or air units. Then, there are the Spitters, which are ranged units that can poison enemies by default, which make early-game raids against the Fallen rather risky.
In fact, all of the designs mentioned thus far make the Fallen very difficult to beat via early-match raids; this takes away a lot of options for dealing with Fallen opponents early on.
The weaknesses of the Fallen faction only becomes apparent later in the match, as the player works up their tech tree. Most of their units are ranged units; this in itself would not be a problem, but another associated problem becomes apparent when the Fallen player tries to mass units for an assault. Despite what was promised by its ambitious developers and publishers, Armies of Exigo has not done anything to alleviate a long-time problem in real-time strategy games, which is that ranged units will stop and stay rooted on the spot as they attack a target.
This means that Fallen units have to work around each other to get at the enemy, which can be a source of frustration. The clog of units also happens to hamper efforts at casting spells that the player needs to influence the battle in his/her favour.
On the other hand, there are also some late-game advantages that the Fallen has that are difficult to counter, though these are expensive options.
For example, the Seeker unit, which is an invisible ghost-like unit that can detect other invisible units, can be used as a "parasite" of sorts by embedding it into a hostile unit, which then reveals what it sees for the player that infected it with the Seeker. It can even be used as an "upgrade" for individual units, which gain the ability to see invisible units too and also gain ever-present regeneration. Other than the latter trait (which requires some observation), there is no other way for enemies to know which Fallen unit has been "upgraded" in this manner.
Another example is the Void Walker, which is a permanent optional upgrade to the Summoner. It has a magical transportation option that will be described later when one mechanism of the game is described. By default, they can morph into another unit and take on their properties and even abilities. This is not just its only trick; the Void Walker can be upgraded to have up to three more spells, which make them far more versatile than most spell-casting units that have been seen in high-fantasy RTS games.
The third campaign introduces the Beastmen, turning the narrative about them around and making them seem noble, if only to make them more appreciable as the faction that would save the day. Otherwise, the Beastmen are the archetypical savage race of warriors. Their units are noticeably tougher and stronger than those of the other factions, but they are also generally more expensive to recruit.
Unlike the other two factions, the Beastmen do not rely on static units or buildings to raise their population caps. Instead, they breed Borons, which are huge bovine animals that can move about and take a lot of damage; this is akin to the Overlords of the Zergs of Starcraft, but they are not as overpowered (e.g. they do not fly and are not detectors). They can be ridden by Goblins, though this only amounts to just a slight upgrade in hitpoints and damage; the decision to have Goblins mount them also cannot be reversed (thus making mounting seem even more like an upgrade).
The Beastmen's worker units have dual uses, depending on whether they are armed or not. When unarmed, it is a typical worker unit known (oddly enough) as the "Minion". When he is armed, which he does simply by going over to the Beastmen's facsimile of the Blacksmith building, he becomes a "Warrior", which is the Beastmen's basic grunt. Conversely, Warriors can convert to Minions by going back to said building to stash away their weapons. (This ability is retained when the player upgrades Warriors into Berzerkers.)
These two unit designs are the Beastmen's most interesting contributions to the library of known RTS game mechanisms. The rest of their designs are either unremarkable, or possibly overpowered.
One of the overpowered designs that the Beastmen have is their defences. Their core defensive building, which is the Totem, can be upgraded to attack both air and ground units and also act as detectors. It is expensive, but difficult to counter short of using siege units.
The Beastmen have units that can gain experience and levels, but gaining levels merely lead to statistical upgrades; they do not gain new abilities, which makes them relatively dull compared to the Empire's units. Moreover, unlike the Empire and the Fallen, the Beastmen have neither direct-healer units or regenerating prowess.
They do have spell-casting units that can sacrifice weak units to heal nearby friendly units, but this requires a lot of micromanagement. There is another alternative, which is the Battle Cry spell, but this one consumes precious gold and gems instead of mana and also has a long cool-down time, making it an unwieldy option.
On the other hand, they have an altar that can be used to resurrect slain veteran troops for a fee. However, to balance this, it only has a limited list of units that can be resurrected, starting with the most experienced unit that the player has lost. The other entries in the list will be replaced with others that are more experienced, condemning the former to oblivion.
Other than the designs that have been noted already, the factions would not seem any more different from so many others that have been made for high-fantasy real-time strategy games; Warcraft fans would be especially riled. The all-too-familiar unit designs also happen to diminish the graphical flair of the game, which is its greatest strength. Although a unit and its animations may look impressive the first time around, their bland designs make these seem repetitive very quickly to the more discerning players.
If there is anything different about Armies of Exigo, it is its range of high-level spell-casting units, though this difference is not necessarily for the better. High-level spell-casting units in this game can be upgraded to have an astonishing number of spells, up to four in fact. Very few RTS games dare to give so many abilities to units other than powerful but few Hero- or Champion-type units, but Armies of Exigo does so for units that the player can churn out in multiples. This can cause some gameplay imbalance.
Perhaps the most displeasing aspect about units and their associated abilities and upgrades is their naming, which may not seem appropriate, given the contrasts between the real-world significance of their names and their actual in-game appearance. For example, the Beholder is a creature that would evoke memories of a certain Dungeons and Dragons creature with many eyes, but in this game, it resembles a creature from Lovecraftian mythos. In-game, it is little more than powerful but slow flying artillery.
Although Armies of Exigo makes use of many tried-and-true designs and then poorly name them such that they seem more than just facsimiles of past entries in the high-fantasy RTS subgenre or just seem inappropriate, it also has some interestingly different takes on gameplay concepts that have been in this subgenre for a long while.
Sometime into the game, an observant player may notice that close-combat units do not necessarily have to be toe-to-toe with their enemies to attack them. Although the A.I. for units do have them going up-close and personal when fighting in close combat whenever possible, there is some leeway given to units that are late to the scrap. They can attack enemies that are just a very short distance away, even if their comrades are between them and their targets.
This is a refreshing change from having to watch units scramble around their comrades just to get at something. Unfortunately, the game does not appear to solve the problem for ranged units in the same way.
Certain spells that units can cast require the player to select at least up to three spell-casting units of the same type before the player can have them casting said spells. These tend to be powerful spells, such as the Beastmen's Witches' ability to summon Demons via a triune of them, and the Empire's Litany, which affects all player-owned units on the map.
As the player explores maps to uncover locations of enemies and untapped resources, the player may find items like potions and scrolls; when retrieved, these appear as icons on the top left portion of the screen. Clicking on these icons and then on units afterwards applies these items on them. This is a different take on the implementation of items in high-fantasy RTS games, which usually require the player to use Hero or Champion units to carry them around; Armies of Exigo's take is a lot more convenient.
On the other hand, the effects of these items are weak. One can see this as a good design, as weak items are not likely to cause gameplay imbalance. However, in the official maps, these items tend to be guarded by powerful and unaligned creatures, such that the items are often not worth the cost to obtain them.
Speaking of Heroes and Champions, there are few of them in this game, and they are generally reserved for the single-player story campaign. These Heroes are not those that have been in games like Warcraft or Heroes of Might and Magic; instead, they are more powerful variants of regular units, which hark back to the days when Hero status for units are little more than re-skins and stat-increases. When they are involved in a chapter of the campaign, their survival is of utmost importance; getting them killed is a straight game-over. This is a very old trope in high-fantasy RTS games, and one that some players may not appreciate.
In addition to these magical items, there may be loose caches of resources on the map, which is reminiscent of Heroes of Might and Magic. Retrieving them gives an immediate boost to the player's resource stockpiles. There may also be glyphs and runes floating around that can be expended for short-term rewards.
Some maps have mercenary camps or equivalent buildings, which allow the player to hire units which are not in his/her army as regular units. These tend to be expensive units with limited supplies, but gaining them gives much useful versatility to the player's forces. These special units also happen to be used as adversaries or hostile encounters as the player follows the storyline of the game.
There are also special buildings that grant certain advantages to the player that controls them, such as a magical tower that grants the occupying player a spell that creates a poisonous fog in a target area, and a warehouse that gives a slow trickle of resources when occupied. However, both of these special units and buildings tend to be in the single-player campaign and not in official multiplayer or skirmish maps.
Taking a leaf from certain high-fantasy strategy games, there are two layers to the game world: one for the surface, one for the cavernous underground. This is nothing new in strategy games, but it is a commendable effort as the transition between the layers is surprisingly smooth, considering the graphics that either has.
Both layers allow the building of bases as long as there is sufficient space and there are resource nodes nearby to support them. In fact, one can say that they are functionally identical; any differences that they have are mostly thematic. The most notable gameplay difference between these two layers is that the resource nodes in the underground layer yield both Gold and Gems.
In the case of the single-player campaign, the underground segments are often used for set-piece scenarios, such as encounters with subterranean monsters or forays into ancient treasure-holds. Some missions restrict base-building in the underground layers too. Each faction has their way of traversing in between these layers.
The Empire faction appears to be the only ones that have permanent solutions for this. They can build mineshafts that allow units to traverse from one point in any layer to a point in the other layer (the two points do not need to be vertically coincident). However, this also poses a risk to Empire players, as enemies can use the mineshafts too if they are not defended.
The Fallen's solution lies in the Void Walker; two of this unit can create linked portals between them that can be used by the player's own units to move from one point of the map to another, even across layers. However, they are vulnerable when maintaining the portals.
The Beastmen have (tribal) Witches that can turn player-owned units into clouds of gas, which can diffuse through obstacles and even across layers but are otherwise very vulnerable while in this form; however, they can switch back to their regular forms at will.
The missions in the story campaigns would be nothing that an RTS veteran – or a player who plays RTS games just for their single-player campaigns – has not seen before. They are the usual gamut: escort missions, resource-collecting missions, assassinations and such others. When an RTS game has such cookie-cutter missions, the writing and narrative has to be interesting enough as a reward for putting up with them; unfortunately, as mentioned earlier, Armies of Exigo does not have exemplary writing and narrative.
However, there are some missions that stand out from the rest; some of these have secondary objectives that require the player to take over and occupy places of power that help in achieving the primary objectives, such as summoning circles that bring in demonic reinforcements.
As mentioned earlier, Armies of Exigo is an astonishingly pretty high-fantasy RTS game for its time. Some of Armies of Exigo's aesthetic designs set it visually apart from other high-fantasy RTS games. One of these is that resource nodes for gold are not typically gleaming chunks of yellow ore. Instead, they resemble real-world gold ore, as in they appear to be pieces of rock with muddy streaks of yellow.
The game also had the latest techniques for generating particle effects at the time, as would be apparent when the player has units casting spells. It also features a diverse range of terrain types, all of which have levels of detail that would put many other RTS games of the time to shame. For example, there is a wasteland-like terrain that features details like weathered rocks and multiple strata in exposed primordial rock.
Combat in this game may look dreary when low-level units are involved; they only stand and trade blows until they die. However, when high-level units with powerful blows and spells enter the fray, low-level units would be thrown around by explosions and also suffer other kinds of animated deaths, which can be a glee to watch.
That is not to say that the graphical designs of the game are implemented well throughout. A keen-eyed player may observe that shadows are only generated and displayed across only one plane of the game world, namely the ground. If there are multiple planes, e.g. one for a bridge and another for the ground or terrain beneath it, shadows are drawn across said ground instead of the bridge.
A large segment of the user interface is reserved for the high-detail animated heads that are a facsimile of unit portraits that have been seen in earlier games. These heads are certainly astoundingly detailed, but they are not well-animated. The voice-acting does not match the lip-synching, especially for humanoid characters. The developers do not seem to realize this however, and heartily use these sparsely animated heads for many in-game cutscenes.
Speaking of in-game cutscenes, the developers do not appear to have given these as much effort as they did the CGI cutscenes. The most that could be expected from characters in these cutscenes is that the models for them waddle around and make very simple animations, if any, in an attempt to emote their expressions and emotions. The lack of facial animations in these models further compounds the impression of laziness on the part of the game designers.
The game's sound designs are not given the same effort as its graphics during development, unfortunately. Many of its sound assets appear to be recycled clips that have been heard in many other games before, like the so-many variants of the rumbling growl of lions and other kinds of slightly altered animal-associated sounds. The sound effects would also seem to be very familiar to RTS game veterans, e.g. very generic clashing of metal, blades swishing back and forth through the air. In fact, the very limited library of sound clips may cause resonation problems when the player selects units too quickly or units attack in simultaneous rhythm.
The voice-acting for sentient units appears to be very limited, e.g. there are only one male voice and one female voice for unnamed human characters. Moreover, the English version of the game may have suffered from translation issues from the original Hungarian script; the first mission in the game alone, in which one antagonist utters "Take them! Your Lives!" (which may be a taunt or threat that has been misstated) would already suggest this. Another example is the Fallen's insistence on mispronouncing "humans".
At least the music for Armies of Exigo sounds convincingly refreshing and different; stirring music is a hallmark of Black Hole Entertainment – one of sorely few. Anyway, the music is composed of orchestral tracks that are inspiring, exhilarating or foreboding, or sometimes all at the same time. That the music is so good, however, only underscores how the rest of the game's sound designs fell so short.
The single-player campaign is hampered with ham-fisted screen-writing that does not do much to have the player immersed in the story. Introductions to characters are done quickly, and are then followed by the exposition on the current mission. The cheesy or bland voice-acting only serves to strengthen the impression that the story is not remarkable. The very predictable A.I. in the story campaigns also detract from the narrative of the game; for example, some characters may remark on the grave threats from multiple enemy bases, but in-game, the player can stave them off by building defences that cut them down as the attacks from these bases come piece-meal.
Unfortunately, the single-player campaign may well be the only experience that the player has with the game, if he/she is not concerned with the other single-player modes of the game, namely skirmish. This is because the multiplayer modes for the game do not benefit from having a large player base during its time, neither does it have more options for multiplayer matches beyond the staples of the genre, e.g. team matches, free-for-alls and king-of-the-hill.
For those who persevered though, the game does have a browser that allows for searches for match lobbies over the Internet, but only through an online service that was run by Electronic Arts, which has long since pulled the plug on it.
In conclusion, Armies of Exigo attempts to dazzle players with its fantastic graphics, musical score and some gameplay innovations, but the rest of its designs are so poor or so familiar that they diminish any good first impressions quickly. It has somewhat competent gameplay, but poor writing and voice-acting detract from it.