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TGS 06: Heroes of Annihilated Empires Hands-On

By Matthew Rorie, GameSpotPosted Sep 24, 2006 2:26 am PT

Annihilated Empires? Sounds serious. We take a look at this upcoming RTS at TGS.

TOKYO--Heroes of Annihilated Empires is a mere month or so away from release, but that didn't stop GSC Game World from showing it off at TGS, despite that the game is a PC title in a sea of console games. Tucked away in a small corner of the booth here, Heroes was fully playable and localized to English in the version on display, which was a refreshing change from the endless frustration of trying to interpret the plot of demoes for Japanese role-playing games.

Anyway, we took over the demo with the control of a hero unit, who loudly complained about the druids who had sent him through some kind of magical teleportation field. He and his armies had been scattered throughout their destination, leaving him temporarily alone and forced to wander around to find them.

Unfortunately for us, we quickly ran into a horde of roaming monsters, who quickly chopped off most of our hero's health. We attempted to turn the tide a bit by using magic; the hero has a number of spells initially available to him, including an ice ball that damages all enemies in front of him; the Eye of Storm, which calls up a ball of lightning that zaps nearby enemies every few seconds; and the humorously titled Call of Nature, which summons in a group of dryads to fight on your side.

With the help of these magical attacks, we fought off the enemies, which appeared to be goblins, and regrouped with a team of our soldiers, consisting of a few knights and some archers. Unfortunately, they were quickly and completely demolished by a group of spider enemies that we found in another direction, and while attempting to have our hero unit retreat, he ran into a couple of large lizards and a flying dragon and was killed. Perhaps we're simply terrible at real-time strategy games, or perhaps we missed something obvious about the game, but we came away from it with an impression of above-average difficulty.

As far as gameplay goes, Heroes of Annihilated Empires seems to be a pretty standard RTS, which abides by the commonplace standards of the genre, such as clicking and dragging a box around your units to select all of them, and so on. Graphically, it looks fairly nice, with some well-detailed units and enemies, despite their small size. Everything is rendered in classic 2D style, which some may find off-putting, but it runs well and looks nice, so this shouldn't be too much of an obstacle for diehard RTS fans.

Stay tuned to GameSpot for more information on Heroes of Annihilated Empires as it nears its release in late October.

14 Comments

  • matajo

    Posted Nov 6, 2006 4:26 am PT

    FANTASTIC!!!

    This game is what I would call the perfect strategy game!

    It is incredibly hard and often frustrating, but somehow, this only adds to the epic feel of the game as a whole.... and this makes it all the more rewarding when your achieve success.
    Ok, it might be a bit of a rip-off from Lord of the Rings..... with elfs, orcs, trolls, druids and an impending threat from a dark lord of the undead.... but the story is surprisingly good and enjoyable, and the graphics are beautiful to behold.
    It can be a little difficult as well to control you units in parts, but the true strength of the game is controlling your heroe and maximizing on your powers to get the job done.

    All in all.... extremely enjoyable and rewarding despite the frustrations.

  • FoE_Freeman

    Posted Oct 13, 2006 2:19 am PT

    I've played the full version and from these options: "Must have"
    "Great"
    "Ok"
    "Sucks"
    "Sucks Bigtime"

    i would have to choose "Sucks" becouse first of all, the graphics dont look good AT ALL, you can tilt the camera using "page up" and "page down" (default) and when you use your scroll button (which most other RTS games have as a zoom option) you rotate the camera.

    The multiplayer option could and SHOULD get allot more attention, it features a staggering 3 maps you can play on, for a 2Gb game i would have expected ATLEAST 10 maps, you have a 2, 4 and 7 player map. (dont ask why 7 and not 8, aint my maps)
    the options you have regarding playstyle is set on "default" and on "RTS Only" but i find no changes in the gameplay what so ever when i switch from one another so this is really a useless feature.

    There are....well there IS a plus point in MP, the recource gathering is sweet so starting the game with 1 million of each recource is just stupid becouse all you have to do then is build a army (which unlike the game presents isnt THAT big at all, at most i had 675 units, in say rome total war the most i had was 20k units, now THATS big).

    There are also units that sometimes get stuck and just walk into one another and keep walking like that which is frustrating and dumb, also it sucks when you build a "big" army that contain horses or tanks or ice golems or w/e, and your tank (for example) just rolls over your own units instead of being the smart one and getting either infront of the group or at the back of the group and not actually wanting to go THROUGH the group.
    I had a small army of 258 Enchantress' and 5 ice golems, i started to walk to my enemy's base and when i got there i had 5 ice golems and 4 enchantress' left....and i didnt even got to fighting yet. this sucks bigtime.

    there should also be a option to call / make units from the future, in the trailer you can actually SEE 2 harrier jump jets flying through the air at the end of it, and in the intro you see a big battle and at the end of it you see one lone soldier walking when you dont see but HEAR modern tracked tanks and you see several bigass spotlights directed at that lone warrior.
    if its there i have yet to find out HOW to actually make them. if its NOT there then i have absolutely no idea why they even showed it in the movies.

    The single player is frustrating, well rather irritating, you constantly have to click a f(beep) baloon in order to continue, you can switch it off (although it says) but it doesnt actually switch them off, the little chat with a ent almost caused me to fall asleep while playing the SP. The only movies that i saw were interesting was the intro movie and the movie at the start of the SP game, after that you get movies in a comic kinda scene, well they ARE comics really, its like somebody is actually telling a bedtime story from a book. it "Sucks Bigtime", would have expected more from a 2Gb game.

    All in all, the game for me is absolutely NOT worth the money i spent on it and its even worse becouse i thoguhtt he worst game i bought was halo 1(PC), guess that honor now goes to HoAE.

    Personal Conclusion: "Sucks Bigtime" for a game released in late 2006 thats over 2Gb in size.

  • Whiggles

    Posted Oct 4, 2006 12:54 am PT

    Looking forward to this. The demo is difficult as hell, but hopefully a straightforward tutorial or two will straighten things out

  • leonheart_z

    Posted Sep 28, 2006 10:09 am PT

    ..nice visuals,and cool artwork..loving it!

  • _Sam_

    Posted Sep 27, 2006 6:28 pm PT

    it doesn't seem that great IMO

  • Irenicmad

    Posted Sep 26, 2006 8:44 pm PT

    Hooray for saying nothing in 2000 words.

  • dragoondark

    Posted Sep 26, 2006 10:55 am PT

    very dissapointed with the demo.

  • Dinghy_Dog

    Posted Sep 26, 2006 10:29 am PT

    Nice concept art.

  • Mehfuz

    Posted Sep 26, 2006 7:14 am PT

    Graphics looking really good

  • DidysiSS

    Posted Sep 26, 2006 4:50 am PT

    nice

  • jakeboudville

    Posted Sep 24, 2006 10:03 pm PT

    sounds awesome

  • JRooftop

    Posted Sep 24, 2006 11:49 am PT

    Souinds exactly liek the demo.... It just gets even more difficult after the bit that they played, during the more RTS part.

  • comthitnuong

    Posted Sep 24, 2006 7:14 am PT

    it looks ok

  • darfvader

    Posted Sep 24, 2006 3:58 am PT

    yay love them ol' 2d rts'es

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