Ok, first things first: Unearthed Arcana. I just got finished reading a list of its contents on EN World, a d20 news site. I must say that I was alternately intrigued and dismayed by what I read. On the one hand, there are some really interesting variants in this book, at least from what I can tell from the brief descriptions provided. Some of them seem long overdue. Variant paladins are interesting; now you can be a paladin of one of four different alignments (Lawful Good, Chaotic Good, Lawful Evil, and Chaotic Evil). I also like the idea of ‘gestalt characters’, which basically means you get to take two classes at once, and combine the effects of both. On the other hand, there is some truly unoriginal stuff in there, too. Racial paragon classes, for instance, are stolen directly from Monte Cook’s Arcana Unearthed (a separate game with a similar name), bloodlines seem like a rip-off of Midnight’s Lifepath system, and they’ve even included an alternate damage system that uses six ‘conditions’, a system that’s been used in about a hojilion other RPGs, including everything that White Wolf has ever made. Plus, you’ve got action points and generic classes taken from d20 Modern, a vitality/wound point system taken from Star Wars, and a sanity system taken from Call of Cthulhu. Oh, and did I mention the variants that just seem plain silly, like one that lets the players roll all of the dice (basically, there are defense rolls instead of attack rolls and spell power checks instead of saving throws)?

I don’t know. I’ll probably wind up buying it eventually, despite the growing disappointment that I’m feeling toward WotC, and I’ll probably even want to use a bunch of the variants as soon as I read them. What can I say? I guess I’m just a sucker for crunchy bits.

As for Eberron . . . snuh. I still feel like there’s not a lot of originality inherent in the setting. However, Dragon keeps publishing these maddeningly tantalizing articles on how the setting is shaping up (much better than the first article, the one that I ranted about), and I think they’re starting to bore through my skull and into the juicy wetness that represents my innermost thoughts and desires. I like D&D a lot, but I like it more with a crapload of options and an extra dose of flavor. That’s what attracted me to Forgotten Realms and, later, Monte Cook’s Arcana Unearthed. It seems like every time I read something new about Eberron, there’s a ‘been there, done that’ feeling; however, there’s also a feeling that I haven’t necessarily been there or done that in D&D. Maybe I’m getting too hung up on originality here. After all, I’m a big fan of the Realms, but there was never anything terribly original about Faerûn; it’s basically the bastard child of Middle-Earth.

In the end, I guess it just makes me sad. I’m still a fan of WotC’s products; they’re generally high-quality and fun to play. However, they haven’t been terribly original for a long time. I mean, what are their big products? You’ve got D&D, which is in the midst of its third iteration (with a fractional value, even). You’ve got Star Wars, which is not only licensed from a popular franchise, but also draws heavily from the old West End Games RPG. You’ve got Call of Cthulhu, which is based entirely on Chaosium’s game of the sam ename, which in turn is based on the fiction of some guy named Lovecraft. I guess he wrote stuff, or something. You’ve also got d20 Modern which, while good, is hardly original. The campaign setting is Earth in present day. You can mix it up by adding in monsters, magic, and/or psionics, but none of this is terribly original either. Despite all this, though, I continue to buy, and enjoy, their products. So, maybe I should just get off my soapbox and continue to enjoy their products, and ignore their lack of innovation. They are, after all, a big corporation, and RPGs make up a very small part of their revenue. Maybe I should leave innovation up to the smaller companies that have less to lose by it.

Eagle Games

Overview

Age of Mythology is a board game based on the popular PC real-time strategy game of the same name. I should probably preface this review by saying that I have absolutely zero contact with the PC game, and only minimal contact with its precursor, Age of Empires. As a rule, I enjoy turn-based strategy far more than I enjoy real-time strategy; I enjoy being able to take my time and plan out my moves rather than having to frantically click on small, moving units. I think that, because of this predilection, I am particularly susceptible to the lures of strategic board games.

At any rate, Age of Mythology is, indeed, a strategic board game. The basic idea is thus: you explore in order to find resources, you gather those resources, and you spend those resources in order to build buildings, recruit soldiers, and advance through the Ages. The goal is not to destroy your opponent, but rather to have the most impressive civilization at the end of the game.

Gameplay

The gameplay of AoM is primarily card-driven. That is, there are seven different Action Cards, three of which you can play each round. Each player has his or her own board, which is used to hold resource tiles, building tiles, resource cubes, and plastic miniatures representing the various units in the game. In order to win the game, you have to amass the most Victory Points by the end of the game.

Each turn is broken down into phases. First, you place Victory Points (represented by red wooden cubes) on one of the four victory conditions; only three Victory Points may be allocated each turn, and each of the first three players in that turn places one point. Second, you draw your Action Cards. Cards may be drawn in any combination up to your current maximum (dependant on your current Age), from each of two decks available to you. One is your Permanent Action deck, which contains one of each Action Card. You may peruse this deck at your leisure, and take whichever cards you want; this allows you to always perform the actions you need to, when you need to. The other deck is the Random Action deck; this deck contains the same actions as the Permanent deck, except that they are more powerful. For instance, the Permanent Build card allows you to build a single structure, while a Random card might allow you to build three or four. Further, some Random cards have associated God Powers, special abilities that can be played in order to break the rules in small ways. The disadvantage of the Random deck, of course, is its randomness; you have no control over what cards you get from it. The third phase consists of card play; each player gets to play three Action Cards from his or her hand. Fourth is resource spoilage; each player may only hold five of each resource (gold, wood, food, and favor) between turns, with all excess going to the bank. Finally, the starting player rotates.

The Action Cards are really the heart of the game, as they allow you to perform the actions you need to perform in order to succeed.There are seven actions: Explore, Gather, Trade, Attack, Build, Recruit, and Next Age. The Explore card allows you to uncover more resource tiles, but has the potential to help your opponents, as well. The Gather card allows you to collect resource cubes, but again, may help your opponents. Trade allows you to trade in your resource cubes for resource cubes of other types, in any combination or quantity, provided that both you and the bank have enough cubes. Attack allows you to pit your own units against those of another, targeting either their City Area (to destroy building), their Production Area (to steal resource tiles), or their Holding Area (to steal resource cubes). Build and Recruit are fairly straightforward, each allowing you to purchase more buildings or units, respectively. Finally, playing a Next Age advances you to the next of four Ages (Archaic, Classical, Heroic, and Mythic). The advantages of advancing in Age are threefold: first, advancing an Age will increase your maximum hand size by one; second, you will gain access to new Hero units; third, the Wonder (a special building that immediately ends the game) can only be built in the Mythic Age.

Combat consists of both strategy and a fair bit of randomness. When an Attack card is played, each player secretly selects which of his or her own units will participate, up to the maximum presented on the Attack card. Next, they form hands of Battle Cards, using only the Battle Cards that correspond to the units selected. Each player chooses a Battle Card to participate in the current portion of the battle, and this determines which unit fights which other unit. Each unit has a combat value, as well as various bonuses or special abilities that can increase its combat value, depending on who or what it is fighting. The combat value refers to the number of six-sided dice that the unit rolls, and each six rolled counts as a victory. The unit with the most victories wins and gets to continue in the battle, while the loser is destroyed.

Overall, the gameplay is quite a lot of fun. There is a definite sense that no single strategy will win all the time, and no single strategy dominates the game. Combat can drag on for a while at times, depending on the size of the battle, and can be quite random.It is entirely possible for a lowly spearman to defeat a mighty frost giant, even though the giant is rolling maybe eight more dice than the spearman; upsets like this happen from time to time, and it’s not unusual for a string of them to happen at once. Generally speaking, though, these faults do not detract from the game.

Presentation

You get a very well-designed game for your $45. There are two boards for each civilization (Norse, Greek, an Egyptian), as well as eight dice to use for battles. The plastic miniatures are easy to identify and plentiful, and all of the cards are well laid-out and quite attractive. Being color blind, I was a little put out by the colors chosen for the various resource cubes. Gold is yellow and favor is blue; these did not bother me. However, the food cubes (green) and the wood cubes (brown) are often difficult for me to distinguish, and the victory cubes (red) can sometimes blend in with the food cubes. However, this is not a problem that everyone will run into, and can be easily circumvented by simply asking which is which (provided your other players are honest and not color blind).

While I’ve heard complaints about things being left out of the rulebook, I never ran into this problem; it seemed to me that everything was well-explained and easy to understand, and none of the games that I’ve played have suffered from any rules problems. Finally, a reference card is included, which presents game setup information and unit information for each civilization (including cost). In addition, the player boards indicate the costs of all buildings, as well as hand size by Age.

Final Word: Not a perfect game, but very close in my opinion. A few minor complaints hardly serve to detract much from the overall game, which is engaging and fun, if you can find players willing to play for two or three hours.

Atari

Overview

Heroes is a fantasy-themed, hack-and-slash adventure with light RPG elements, very much in the style of Baldur’s Gate:
Dark Alliance or the Diablo series. Having been a fan of both BG:DA and Diablo II, and also being a great proponent of D&D and roleplaying in general, I was understandably excited about Heroes when I heard about it. When I thought about it (before its release), I had visions of some unholy union of Dark Alliance and the old Tower of Doom arcade game, visions that made me very, very giddy. Now that I have it, though, what do I think about it? Before I answer that question, let me explain the game that is Heroes to the uninitiated.

The storyline of Heroes is about as straightforward as they come. Long ago, in the kingdom of Baele, there was a wizard, Kaedin. Kaedin was powerful, but more importantly, he was Evil, with a capital ‘E’. He wanted to take over the world, or some such thing, and in order to do so he set about killing and burning everyone and everything in sight. In desperation, the movers and shakers in Baele called for heroes to come to their aid and fight against Kaedin. Four heroes answered the call: a human fighter, a dwarven cleric, and elven wizard, and a halfling rogue. They fought, and finally defeated, Kaedin, but in so doing they, themselves, were killed. Bummer.

Flash forward about 250 years. A bunch of evil clerics try to revive Kaedin in order to steal his powers, as evil clerics are wont to do. Unfortunately for them, they botch the job, and instead they bring Kaedin fully back to life. In a rather ungrateful move, Kaedin destroys the clerics who brought him back to life, then goes back to his old ways of killing and plundering for the sake of world domination. In desperation, the powers that be of Baele decide to resurrect the four fallen heroes that originally defeated Kaedin, and charge them with doing it again. Having little choice in the matter, the newly-revived heroes agree. That’s where the game begins.

As a story, it’s pretty formulaic and forgettable. Luckily, hack-and-slash adventures are very rarely about the story. It would be fair to say, in fact, that they are generally all about the hacking and slashing of various hostile beings. So it is with Dungeons and Dragons: Heroes. The game consists largely of moving from area to area, slaying everything in sight with either weapons or magic, and collecting all sorts of loot that you can keep and use, or sell for other, better loot. By now, you might think that I don’t like Heroes very much. You’d be wrong, though.

Gameplay

As an adaptation of D&D, Heroes not only falls short of the mark, but doesn’t even seem to really know where the mark is, or that it’s supposed to be aiming for said mark. However, as a hack-and-slash, Heroes is a whole bucket-load of fun. The controls are tight and the on-screen mayhem is pretty constant. Although it might become somewhat repetitive in single-player (I wouldn’t know, I haven’t played the game alone yet), multiplayer is a blast. I would argue, in fact, that anyone who does not play this game with at least one other person is missing the whole point. Heck, the game even sports a disclaimer, on both the disk and the manual, announcing that the game is “Best Played Together”.

On to the specifics of the gameplay, then. Perhaps one of my favorite things about this game is the way the controls work. It breaks down as follows. The left thumbstick moves your character, while the right thumbstick controls the camera (clicking it brings up the auto-map). The left trigger blocks, while the right trigger brings up the button configuration menu. Here’s the part that I like. The four main face buttons are the ones you’ll be using most often. A is always mapped to your standard melee combo, X and Y are mapped to ‘Power Moves’, and B is mapped to useable items. While the right trigger is depressed, you are able to specify which Power Moves and items you would like to equip, and which buttons activate them. In this way, you are able to use the dozens upon dozens of special attacks and abilities that the game eventually thrusts upon you. Finally, the white and black buttons use health and ‘mystic will’ potions, respectively. I cannot stress enough how much I like this configuration. It’s easy to learn, allows easy access to all of your moves and items, and allows you to really let loose on all those virtual hobgoblins and such.

The various playable characters each play differently from one and other, and each is a powerhouse in his or her own right. The fighter is absolutely unstoppable in pure melee combat, the wizard has a number of destructive and highly useful spells, the cleric balances melee prowess with defensive magic, and the rogue excels in ranged combat and indirect attacking. Each character has a whole laundry list of abilities that can be bought with ‘level-up points’, and each character’s abilities support his or her own style of smiting. Better still, some of these abilities lend themselves well to multiplayer. The cleric’s Heal spell, for example, heals the entire party at higher levels, while the rogue’s ability to open locked chests without the use of keys cannot be overstated in its utility.

As I’ve said, the game is quite a lot of fun to play when you’ve got a buddy or two to play with. The cooperative nature of the game works quite well, and I have-on many occasions-completely lost track of time while hacking my way through a dungeon with friends. However, the gameplay is not perfect. The game makes sure that you level up at a fairly steady pace, and this is both boon and bane. On the one hand, it’s exciting to level up and get new abilities. Every time you get more points, it’s like a little, personal Christmas. As satisfying as this is, though, the more powerful you get, the easier the game gets. It seems as though Atari put a lot of thought into making sure that the level-up rate was steady, but didn’t put as much thought into increasing the game’s difficulty in a proportional way. While I’m sure the game does get more difficult toward the end of the game (relative to the beginning of the game, at least), it doesn’t really feel all that difficult. In fact, towards the end of the game, everyone in my party had somewhere around fifteen Raise Dead Amulets (the game’s primary method of handling player death), and nobody was really having to use them all that often. Not only that, but the game’s bosses seemed distinctly more difficult nearer to the beginning of the game than they did toward the end.

Graphics/Sound

The graphics in this game certainly get the job done, although there seems to be a distinct lack of flare. When compared to something like Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, I can’t help but wonder why the graphics in Heroes aren’t as good. After all, Heroes is a reasonably recent release, and an Xbox exclusive to boot. Dark Alliance, on the other hand, has had time to mature, and was a PS2 port. It seems that more work could have been put into the game’s graphics, though it doesn’t really detract from the game that much.

Similarly, the sound is pretty average. All of the sounds that you’d expect to be there are: the clanking of steel on steel, the thunk of an arrow hitting home, the growls of hostile creatures. It all does a good job of supporting the gameplay, though nothing really stands out. The voice acting is on the reasonably good side. I didn’t notice anything stellar, but I also didn’t cringe when any of the characters talked. The music is good, if a bit forgettable. It succeeds in setting the adventurous tone well, but it isn’t one of those rare few game soundtracks that I find myself humming while not playing the game.

Final Word: This is a thoroughly enjoyable, if somewhat flawed, hack-and-slash. With four very different playable characters, it has a good amount of replay value, and the multiplayer mayhem is a blast. If you want a game with a good story or strong RPG elements, though, this game may not be for you.