Rise & Fall: Civilizations at War is a good RTS game, saved by ability to fight in 3rd person.

User Rating: 7 | Rise & Fall: Civilizations at War PC
The expectations for Rise & Fall: Civilizations at War was high. In this game, you will encounter huge naval battles, heroes of ancient times, such as: Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Alexander and Achilles and intense moments of fighting.

The game takes place in ancient Greece and Rome. There are two campaigns available. Alexander Campaign and Cleopatra Campaign. In each campaign you will follow either Alexander or Cleopatra through their mission to save the day. The missions are very well made, with lots of different and fun variations. Such as 3rd person naval battles, gladiator fights, sneaking through a whole in the enemy defenses and destroying vital buildings and fighting against other important characters.

Another great and innovative feature is Hero Command Mode. This lets you zoom in on your hero to fight in 3rd person mode. Each hero has one or two special abilities, such as artillery barrage which rains down a deadly barrage on the enemy. During some mission you will have to control your hero through the entire map. This CAN be frustrating, but only if you play on hard difficulty. Hero mode lets you block attacks with a shield, but this is quite useless, since you seem to take almost the same amount of damage, and using 5 seconds of blocking could have killed ten enemy soldiers, so basicly you just go into hero mode to "hack n' slash".

Other than this, the game is a fairly normal RTS game. Building, gathering recourses, recruiting armies, but one thing is quite new, or at least not that used. Naval battles. You can recruit a drummer on your ship, and get the ability to ram other ships which is a cool feature. Also boarding is another feature, which lets you take control of the enemy ship if you eliminate all who are occupying the ship. A ship also works as a naval barracks, and it doesn't seem to have any limitations to how many troops you can recruit. An excellent way to take the enemy by surprise. Well in which case you don't, since the enemy AI is pretty simple.

The graphics are not fantastic. In fact they are quite bad. Also arrows fly right through a lot of solid objects. Also this game's first developer quit the project and was taken over by another developer, which seems to have come at a price, with graphics and physics in mind.

Rise & Fall has great variated gameplay, and gives you at least 15 hours of intense game play. Graphics are bad and weighs down on the gameplay, but overall this game is great.