Ancient Trader is a good indie strategy game with great aesthetics but lack of depth makes it repetitive.
Striking old-world artistic presentation
Fun mix of exploration, leveling, and maritime card combat
Map-generator for extended replay value with multiple difficulty settings
Lack of save feature means dropping out of long games at times
Can be tedious; Not enough depth of game features to warrant the length of scenarios
*For the original review, with pics, please visit:
http://www.gamespot.com/pages/unions/forums/show_msgs.php?topic_id=27373511&union_id=19694&msg_id=323336108#323336108
* * * * * * * * * *
Ancient Trader, developed by FourKidsGames and recently released (6/27/10) to XBIG, is a maritime strategy game involving trading goods, battling opponent ships and sea monsters, map exploration, and mini quests. With a fantastic presentation, it's unfortunate that given the length of game scenarios (around 1 hr) Ancient Trader has a tendency to become boring half way through each map. Such tedium is largely due to repetitive actions you'll undertake along the way to winning any given match.
For my first play through Ancient Trader, I was mesmerized. The game purports all the trappings of a fun and engaging strategy game born out on the dreams of Jules Verne. You'll begin by selecting one of four "avatars" (for lack of a better term) who differ only by which image you'll be associated with. From there, you'll embark from a random port in a reasonably large world-map, most of it covered by clouds until you explore any given map square. Since you'll need to improve your combat strength, cargo capacity, and ship speed by trading (how else will you take out the sea creatures?) you'll need to stock up on one of 3 goods (tea, spice, and fruit) at a low price to sell at another port at a high price, as any good economist knows. There's a ton of ports on any given map, and you can see from the map the buy/sell cost of any particular good at any port. The name of the game is earning money through trade to improve your ship, of course. Money buys increased cargo space (for earning more money), faster ship speed (for earning money faster), and weapon upgrades. Each port will sell a different combination of upgrades, so you'll need to explore a bit to keep improving.
Of course, the main function of earning money will be to improve your combat abilities. Combat in Ancient Trader uses an interesting, albeit somewhat shallow, card mechanic in fights. As a ship, you can improve your 3 cards from level 1 to 8, including sword fighting, cannons, and artilery (i think, don't quite remember?). Each of these cards is red, blue, or green, and each colored card has an advantage over a different color: blue over red, red over green, and green over blue. At the beginning of each combat match, both players select a card to face off with, taking into account a card's level number ( 1-8 ) and color (R,G,B). Whoever wins keeps their card, while the loser loses their card for the duration of the match. The player to lose all 3 of their cards loses. If both players select an equally matched card, say sword (blue) ranked 1, then 50/50 chance determines the winner for that round. While color is very important in match ups, leveling your combat cards is very important, such that a card with a high enough number can beat a lower-value card, even if it's color has an advantage.
As you continue to level up your combat cards and increase your trade profits, you'll also spend a decent amount of time exploring each game's large map, finding random bottles with treasure, and taking quests from certain ports to earn extra gold which either involve traveling to a different port or defeating a specific sea monster. The game ends when the final sea monster boss is defeated, followed by a tally of accumulated points for the 4 players (typically you and 3 AIs) which are earned from all of the actions described above. Each game will take at least 1 hour, depending on the difficulty setting.
While Ancient Trader initially feels like a rather robust strategy game with enough to do to keep things interesting, unfortunately it ends up feeling dull through repetitive action, however. Each game seems to drag on longer than feels necessary, and key gameplay mechanics are too easy to rig in your favor.
For instance, in trading, it's pretty easy actually to find 2 ports near each other, each of which sells one good cheap and another expensive. To make money super quick, you just need to by good A in port 1 and sell it in port 2, and then buy good B in port 2 to sell in port 1. If the differences are great enough, you can easily spam the system, since the prices of goods aren't dependant on distance from one another, and there's only 3 goods to buy and sell. Similarly, combat is far too easy due to only have 3 combat cards. After the first cards are laid, if you've won the first one (randomly) it's easy to win the rest. Simply put, if the opponent has a green and blue card left, you simply play a green card (since at worst you'd be even money, and at best have an advantage over blue), and when you win, you follow up with whatever card has the advantage over the remaining card. The ability, therefore, to calculate simply the results by easy probability makes combat far too easy. With a few more card types, greater range in strength values, or other advantages/disadvantages perhaps to combat location, combat could be improved, but as is can be tedious too. Furthermore, avatars should give more depth to the play, like they do in the Civilization series games, where choosing an avatar awards a variety of advantages and disadvantages, which could include more starting capital, faster ships, greater cargo limits, increased initial combat card values etc. On top of those ideas, the lack of the ability to save one's progress in a game is annoying, since you'll have to commit a set length of time to any playthrough, and games can take a while to complete.
All of which is to say that Ancient Trader is a fun game with limitations. The visual art is fantastic, with its renaissance maps and images. The sound, also, is really good, mostly filled with ambient wave and wind sounds, rather than annoying heart-pumping music.
All told, Ancient Trader is a decent game. With a general lack of good strategy games on XBIG, Ancient Trader should likely be worth a look to anyone interested in trading-warfare games like this. The excellent sound and visual design strengthen what is otherwise a decent, though often repetitive experience. However, with multiple difficulty setting and a random map generator, there's a lot to like about Ancient Trader despite its flaws.
Rating 7.8/10