Developer Interview

Creative Assembly's Sophie Blackmore talks about the making of Spartan: Total Warrior.

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Announced in March of this year, Spartan: Total Warrior is a console action game being developed for Sega by UK-based Creative Assembly--a company best known for its Total War series of PC real-time strategy games. Like those games, Spartan: Total Warrior will feature epic battles between historical armies. Unlike those games, Spartan: Total Warrior will afford you control of only a single soldier. During a recent visit to Creative Assembly, we had an opportunity to check out Spartan: Total Warrior on the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube, and we're pleased to report that all three versions of the game are looking great and nearing completion.

Your shield can actually be more useful than your sword in crowd control situations.

At first glance, you could easily mistake Spartan: Total Warrior for a mindless button masher of a fighter, but you'll realize your mistake moments later, when the game's optional tutorial hints kick in during the first level. The tutorial amounts to little more than instructions on how to perform certain moves, but it does a great job of familiarizing you with the game's unusual, though intuitive, control scheme. You'll have two melee attack buttons in Spartan: Total Warrior--one used for "direct" attacks on single enemies, the other used for "round" attacks that target any adversaries within range as you swing your arm in a circular motion. You'll be able to modify these attacks by holding down shoulder buttons as you perform them; you can use your shield rather than your weapon, for instance, or unleash a powerful special attack using any "rage" that you've managed to build up. The controls will be identical for all of Spartan's five different melee weapons, although each has a quite different feel and will afford you completely different special and "god power" attacks. We also noticed that very similar controls are used for the Spartan bow that complements your sword and shield at the start of the game, letting you fire either a single arrow at a target, or a volley of arrows in an arc.

The first level of the game, which we were able to play through on both the PlayStation 2 and Xbox, sees the ancient Greek city-state of Sparta coming under attack from a Roman army. The Romans are using siege towers to get their soldiers over the sizable city walls, so your first job as one of many Spartans defending the city is to locate and kill the centurions leading the assaults from each of the three towers. The centurions are considerably more challenging to defeat than the regular Roman soldiers, not just because they seem more resilient to your attacks, but because they're smart enough to use the shields they carry and counterattack you if and when the opportunity arises. One of the best ways to defeat the centurions, as far as we could tell, was to use a "shield-breaker" move (jumping in the air and bringing your sword down onto the shield to destroy it) before attempting any kind of frontal attack. To get close to the centurions, you'll have to battle your way through numerous soldiers, who offer little challenge in one-on-one situations but aren't at all shy about attacking you in numbers. We found our shield to be particularly useful when we were confronted by soldiers, since we could swing it around to push back several attackers simultaneously or knock individual enemies onto their behinds, before we moved in to perform an instant fatality attack--stabbing the fallen enemies before they have a chance to get back on their feet. Our shield could also be used to push enemy soldiers off the city walls to their deaths.

Enemies continue to pour out of these siege towers until you destroy them.

After the centurions from each siege tower had been defeated, our next goal was to destroy the towers themselves. Our melee weapons weren't up to the job, so we had to escort bomb-carrying "sappers" to each of the towers in turn and then move a safe distance from the explosions. Because the Romans were intelligent enough to realize what we were up to, the sappers we were escorting came under constant attack, and since neither their health bars nor their armor could take a lot of punishment, we frequently resorted to simply pushing enemies away from them with our shields, rather than trying to finish them off. You'll be far from invincible yourself, by the way, which is why shrines that can be used to replenish both your health and power bars are scattered pretty liberally throughout the early levels. There were also a number of chests containing arrows to be found in Sparta, but we were having so much fun with the melee combat that we rarely used them.