The idea is: play through authentic ancient battles of Greece and Egypt, with the ability to take direct control of historical personalities in third-person action sequences. In practice, the third-person mode is janky as hell and has the minimum amount of mechanics and physics required to even qualify as action gameplay. It’s not fun to play at all, the only cool thing about it being the ability to look at the battlefield from a more immersive angle.

Unlike the Total War games, you can gather resources and build your base, Empire Earth style (the game made by the same developers). It’s just a shame that the map design often does not accommodate the amount of options you’re given. For example, on one map there was a kind of river or a canal, so I decided to build a dock in hopes that it will allow me another approach to the enemy camp. The shore was steep, so the dock ended up being built under water, but that’s okay, it still works. So I made a ship and sent it North, and immediately it got stuck at the first turn…. So I had to delete that ship and that dock and build a new dock upstream, with a new ship, meaning I spent double the amount of resources (and the supply is limited). Finally I sail North until I encounter enemy walls with a tiny peninsula with a couple of gold chests. So, I figure I’ll grab one of my ladder carriers and sneak my troops over the wall here, where there’s no security. So I sail back and try to dock, but the ship is incapable of doing it pretty much anywhere except that place down South where I got stuck originally. In other words, there’s no way for me to put my ladder carrier on it, which means the whole initiative was doomed from the start. Okay, maybe you’re not meant to build a ship on this map, but then why let me? Why not remove the canal or remove the dock from the list of building? And there’s something like this in pretty much every map.

That is when they’re not throwing you into exclusively third-person maps, which are stupid and boring, but at least everything works there. I only played the Greek campaign, and there’s literally a mission where you, as Alexander the Great, are fighting in a gladiator arena. …

As far as I can tell, there isn’t even a proper skirmish mode. You can select stand-alone scenarios, but you can’t configure anything about them.

To give the credit where it’s due, the game did have some unique gameplay mechanics that I wish more games utilized. For example, smart-formations, which allow you to bundle individual soldiers into grouped units. In most older real-time strategies every soldier was a unit, which was a mess, whereas in newer ones one unit is usually a squad. Here you get the best of both worlds, and you can adjust how many soldiers you want in one unit. But where the game really shines is in the naval battles. Every ship is an actual platform that you can traverse. You can ram other ships and tear them apart, or grapple them with hooks and board your units onto them. There is one mission where you get to experience all of that in third-person as well, and it looks really cool (though, again, the gameplay sucks).

In general I found controls here rather unintuitive, the units rather unresponsive and erratic with an unpedictable and irrational AI, and the battles look and feel very stiff and unengaging.