Rise of Nations
Posted: 5/6/03 by Sean | Comments (17)

Graphics and sound
By far the weakest area of the game, so let’s get it out of the way. Even with detail turned up, this game is hardly a great looker. The roads are nice, and it’s always fun to get that new Civics upgrade and watch your opponent’s borders contract, but that aside it’s bog-standard RTS fare, with cities changing from primitive dwellings to glittering metropolises, troops wandering over anonymous-looking terrain, and fish that just swim in circles the whole time.

One thing that should be noted is that, for instance, one infantry unit is actually represented as three on screen. You might think that this is a cheap trick, that they’re just trying to pretend there’s more freedom there is, but I certainly found it useful psychologically. Besides, most of this game is about removing micromanagement, so this is perfectly consistent with that.

This isn’t the real problem with the graphics, though. The problem is that they are s-l-o-w. An RTS simply should not require much tweaking to run smoothly, especially when it doesn’t even look that good. On the plus side, though, if you turn detail down to get better FPS you’ll know that you’re not missing much. I’d even venture to say that I preferred the homogenous Empire Earth graphics to these, at the settings I could run both at.