The single player game is centered around a nonlinear campaign set on a strategic map divided into provinces. Moving your hero unit onto an enemy province will initiate a battle for that province. Some of these battles will move the campaign’s storyline along through the use of extended, in-engine cutscenes while others will help shore up your forces for the harder battles ahead. The story’s a bit convoluted, but if you’re looking to RTS games for compelling storylines then you’re in the wrong genre.

Alin city under attack.

Resource collection in the game is an automated process. You build mines at resource sites, assign miners, and then move on. Gold is generated by creating automated caravan routes. There’s no need to micromanage gatherers or diminishing resource locations. Most of your base building is centered on cities. You expand cities by adding “districts” that are focused on different aspects of your empire. For example, military districts will boost your unit cap while merchant districts will allow you to collect resources faster. New districts must be placed adjacent to your current city, so you may find some cities’ growth limited by the surrounding terrain. Large cities are pretty impressive to behold, bustling with life and all sorts of activity. Cities and structures have the added feature of defining the borders of your territory. Your units can heal in your own territory while enemy units take attrition damage, making pushing your borders far and wide a high priority.

If you’ve played Rise of Nations, or many other RTS games for that matter, the basics of play will be familiar to you. Rise of Legends adds hero units to the mix, who bring special powers to the battle along with their high hit points and damaging attacks. The campaign game adds an RPG element to hero development, as heroes can be awarded points to be used to buy new powers or upgrade existing ones.

As for the game’s AI, it’s more defensively minded than aggressive. Attacks generally take the form of consistent small forays against your defenses and the AI doesn’t seem to take the time to put together a concerted, combined arms offensive against you. The AI does do a good job of establishing defenses and making you work to get in close and set-up a hard-fought final battle. As a result of this, the battles tend to play out on the long side, with you taking the time to build up an army capable of overwhelming the AI’s defenses. It also means that strategy veterans will not have too much trouble making it through the game or have to suffer many setbacks.

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