Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends is a real-time strategy game for the die-hards of the genre. The game makes no bones about being easy to pick up and play or being a perfect fit for every gamer regardless of their play style. It's for those that devour the nuance of real-time strategy.

If you played Rise of Nations you'll find a lot of similarities between the two games: the National Borders, unit attrition, and the basic game interface is pretty much the same. However, instead of familiar nations with easily identifiable units inside armies that varied only slightly, Rise of Legends throws you into a completely new world full of Clockworkmen and Afreets.

This is actually part of the game's learning curve – it takes quite a while to familiarize yourself with the units in the game because this is in no way, shape, or form a genetic fantasy world where you can guess what each unit can and cannot do simply by name. This is both a strength and a weakness; it's very hard to establish a sense of history with brand new races (even games like StarCraft drew heavily upon other games, like Warhammer 40K) but at the same time it's refreshing to play a fantasy themed game without any orcs or dwarfs.

Instead of the usual suspects you get the Vinci with their industrialized creativity, the Alin, a magic-based race inspired by tales of the Arabian Nights, and the Cuotl, which is one of the most eclectic races with its stone statues, cloaking devices and lasers, to see the light of day in a strategy game in quite some time. What makes the races work, though, is that they all use vastly different styles in addition to their aesthetic differences. It's debatable just how balanced the game is, but it's clearly close enough to not provide one race with any huge advantage – it's all a matter of using each race's strengths to the best of their ability while minimizing their weaknesses, which is the hallmark of any good strategy game. One tactic that the game eschews is the old turtle strategy of building a base without the thought of attacking but rather waiting for your opponent to come to you. This is not a game that plays at a leisurely pace, particularly online, mainly because the design pushes you to explore and attack neutral settlements early in the battle. In addition, most of the game's defensive units and towers are next to useless. Units walk through tower attacks as if annoyed by a swarm of moths.

The campaign follows the similar style of the Rise of Nations Conquer the World design wherein you move in a turn based fashion around the map, attacking provinces as you see fit. In truth, the campaign isn't as freeform as it appears to be as you usually end up fighting the fights the game wants you to anyway. There are three of these campaigns, one for each race, and it feels as if the game uses the campaigns as a proving ground for when you play skirmish or multiplayer battles. Filled with bad voice acting and a tired script, the campaigns are fairly stale compared to a big skirmish game. You never feel any real connection to the characters and it all feels pretty hokey.

Another weakness is the game's sound. It's stunningly bad. The Vinci Rifleman sound like they are shooting pop guns and even its Steam Tanks sound very weak. In fact the sound effects even cut out completely from time to time. It's a bit of a shock for such a high profile and big budget game to suffer from such poor sound quality.

Visually, Rise of Legends is both highly creative and whimsical and at the same time disappointing. There's no denying that Big Huge Games had a lot of fun coming up with the bestiary with jaguars that shoot laser beams fighting giant mechanical spiders but the units look like stickers pinned to a magnet board rather than something that is a part of the landscape. This also rings true because some of the animations are fairly simple. Adding to the frustration is that it takes a pretty high end PC to run the game without a lot of stuttering (you can ignore the minimum system requirements). On a 2.4GHz 1 GB RAM machine with a dated and yet serviceable video card (a Radeon 9700) the game performed decent but a lot of the detail had to be turned down in order for it to run at an acceptable frame rate. Finally, while multiplayer is a blast, there are connection issues that are still as of yet unresolved. Getting online is easy enough and there are a lot of online options from auto matching, an easy to use friends list, etc. The problem is keeping a game going due to sync errors and such. A patch is supposedly forthcoming, so hopefully it can get ironed out soon. It's not that every online game fails to work it just has more hiccups than it should.

So the game clearly has a lot of baggage. The rub though is that it's also undeniably fun despite its shortcomings. The different factions provide an almost limitless array of strategic options due to the multiple summon-able heroes, individual tech trees and racial powers.

Rise of Legends has developer Brian Reynolds's fingerprints all over it. This is yet another Reynolds strategy game that aims to please the hardcore gamer while being accessible enough for new players to learn the ropes if they are willing to put the time in thanks to the amazingly intuitive interface and striking game balance. It might not be the best real time strategy game of the year (Battle for Middle–Earth II is tough to beat) but it's clearly a worthy follow-up to Rise of Nations. - William Abner