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Alexander: The Heroes Hour

Sam camps it up Imperial-style, but is he homosexual?

Racking my brains I cannot think of another game that has focused on the exploits of the greatest military conqueror of all time. So it cannot be coincidence that this RTS title has made an appearance at exactly the same time as Oliver Stone's biopic of the Macedonian marvel hits the silver screen. It must be noted that this is not the official tie in. Coming from small developers Meridian 93, previously responsible for nothing you will have heard of before, Alexander: The Heroes Hour comes across as a bog standard cash-in. There's nothing on the box to make a prospective purchaser decide to buy this over the multitude of other games on the shelves (apart from the hand painted front cover which harks back to the halcyon days of 8-bit box art). There's a full campaign, multiple factions like the Persians and Egyptians, a lot of 'monumental' stuff, (3D graphics and hand-to-hand combat), unique weapons and equipment and the lure of "gripping 3D battles". Typical marketing guff.

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So I was surprised when the game got under way and I was presented with what appeared to be an RPG/RTS hybrid. In fact, the back of the box is utterly misleading, as Alexander is more akin to Dungeon Siege (without the magic) than anything else. There's no base building, just three heroes and some auxiliary troops adventuring their way across the satisfyingly expansive maps. Not only did I have heroes but I had to equip the little fellows as well. Similar to the heroes your soldiers have a number of stats such as attack, defence, hit points and experience. I was intrigued. More so when I discovered that these stats expanded to include such things as throwing skill and critical hit chance. Promising. The heroes also have a skill tree, similar to Diablo 2's, which gets filled out as you accumulate levels.

The game is free of dodgy voice acting, mostly due to its liberation from any speech at all. All of the story and quests are presented in clickable text. It must be said that the writers may not have always been paying the closest respect to the source material, as incongruous dialogue, such as a citizen pining for her lost spectacles centuries before their invention, sometimes mar the proceedings. Attention has instead been focused on the fully spiny-rotaty camera with its restricted amount of zoom. A compromise between a rotatable camera and fixed one is well implemented. You can spin things round to get a different viewing angle but the perspective will gently spring back to the default view after you release the middle mouse button. This worked wonderfully and should be an option in all 3D top-down games forthwith. Still, I quickly freed the camera from this restriction as the size and layout of many objects in the levels asks for a change of perspective.

The graphics are generally very good. There's a massive amount of detail in each level with swaying trees, fish swimming in the water and all kinds of incidental animations and objects all helping to create an absorbing gameworld. Simple things, such as the great amount of time that has obviously been spent ensuring that the brushes used to paint the terrain are never repetitive, combine to make this game more than able to compete with the looks of the very best efforts from the largest houses.

The controls are fairly basic, but the hot-keys take some getting used to. Play relies on the use of the heroes skills and while the keys are all clustered around the WASD layout there's a fair challenge in remembering which heroes skills correspond to which key. If you can master the hot-keys the controls are reasonably benign although I did witness arbitrary switching between running and walking speeds way too often, which led to my party being separated at the wrong moment. Pathfinding is also in need of some work, with heroes often taking a long way round to attack their designated foe. They also aren't adverse to chasing a feeling enemy half-way across the map either, another unnecessary frustration. Unit selection is rather good on the whole, even if the game suffers from mashing up the units during combat, making unit distinction occasionally hit and miss. For some reason I also had a lot of problems with deselecting units but this probably has more to do with a brain bloated from Christmas overindulgence than a fatal flaw in the coding. The pace of the heroes during combat is also too slow, as one guy seems to be on a morning stroll, admiring the wildlife while his mates are having swords stuck into them from every direction. Picking up the spoils of war is a cumbersome and lengthy affair, with a hero standing over loot for over a second before they decide to slip it in their backpack. When it comes to collecting lots of potions it's too easy to click on the next target before the first is accounted for. Like the movement speeds and pathfinding, a little tweaking in a patch would improve things greatly.

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