There was a time when only good games got sequels. Bad games were usually forgotten, or at least noticeably changed for the next go around. So you have to wonder what World Forge was thinking when they made Great War Nations: The Spartans. Not only is it a sequel to one of 2007’s most tedious real time strategy games, it is virtually indistinguishable from it.

So the good news is that if you liked Ancient Wars: Sparta, this is your chance to play it again. The three nations from that game (Sparta, Persia and Egypt) are back, joined by a single new faction. Once again, the differences between the nations are largely cosmetic; with each side have roughly analogous buildings and units. You still need to go through upgrade after upgrade after upgrade to get even a decent sized hoplite army together. And you can still customize your units with whatever combination of body, armor and weapon you like – the only real innovation in this series.

The only thing the game adds is the new Macedonian faction and two new campaigns, one following the adventures of Alexander the Great and the other the reign of Sparta’s Agesilaus. Since these are RTS campaigns, neither one bears even a superficial resemblance to history, but the bigger problem is their insistence on the puzzle game mentality of scenario building. You are given a larger primary objective, and then a bunch of secondary objectives that will lead you to the end. You’d have to be some kind of idiot not to follow the hand holding to the letter since the designers clearly have an idea of what they want you to do.

The problem, of course, is that there are rarely any alternatives to the hints you are given. Even if you think you have a better idea, the game goes out of its way to not let you do it. For example, do you want to take Miletus by scaling the walls instead of paying a bribe to some Greek spy? The game won’t let you build ladders, though it will let you waste gold and wood building a siege weapon factory that just sits there. The fact that most of these missions can take over an hour to finish does little to make the campaigns all that much fun, no matter how cool it is to “summon” Bucephalus to the field.

The pacing of the game is, again, all off. It takes too long to do much of anything (at least three steps before you can build swordsmen, for example) so if you wait until you have fancy soldiers with weapons more sophisticated than clubs, there’s a good chance you will be blind-sided by an enemy that is perfectly happy beating your brains in with a stick.