Julius Caesar wants to expand his already massive empire and he has his sights set on the lush countryside of Gaul. Celtic Kings: Rage of war brings you the excitement of the Roman conquests in two modes: strategic and adventure.
In strategic mode, you play as either the Romans or the Gauls in a world where tactical and strategic manoeuvres are the key to victory.
In adventure mode you take on the role of Larax and the battle the warring tribes who have raided your village and killed your wife.
Two exciting game modes, one action-packed conquest - let the best warrior win!
This game has been patched to the latest official version: 1.16
Age requirements: ESRB Rating: EVERYONE with Violence. PEGI Rating: 12+ with Violence.
Minimum system requirements: Windows XP or Windows Vista, 1 GHz Processor (1.4 GHz recommended), 256MB RAM (512 recommended), 3D graphics card compatible with DirectX 8.1 (compatible with DirectX 9 recommended), Mouse, Keyboard.
I played this game few years ago and i cant remember to much about adventure mod, but i remember that i played it a lot in single player and multiplayer mode and had a lots of fun. So, when i saw it on gog, i bought it again, like many other old games which i liked and played much (17 games until now from gog).
After i search through game menu and played tutorial again, i... full review may say i remembered few more things about it.
In this game, single player mode is skirmish mode where you can play against 1 to 7 AI. This mode concentrate more on RTS side of game with your heroes and units getting XP and lvls from fights or training. And you can find and wear different types of items too, which will improve you or your units.
When you start a single player game, you can setup a lot of things:
- map size (small, normal or huge), map type (small islands, large islands, continent, mountainous or mediterranean type), game type (elimination which i prefer more, score limit or time limit), world population (low, normal, high), game speed from low to fastest, starting gold and even season on map;
- you can disable/enable fog, caves, ruins, teutons tents, stonehenges, outposts and even wildlife;
- you can chose for every AI opponent a playing style like offensive (on easy, medium or hard) or defensive (on easy, medium or hard), you can chose a nation (gauls or romans) to play with for you and for AI and you can play against all AI or you can team-up with some of them.
Multiplayer mode is same with single player mode, only that you can play against your friends through local lan or gamespy.
I may advice you to begin with tutorial and use Pause/Break key on your keyboard to pause the game and read in-game help (F1 key). Here you can find everything explained (map, fog of war, resources, capturing, feeding, heroes, unit stats, special abilities, notes and objectives, units list, buildings list, items list, shortcut keys), everything explained with short descriptions for fast reading and enough to understand this game easier without boring you much.
Unlike many other RTS games, here you wont and cant build anything, but maps have lots of structures on them that you and your opponents can capture, destroy and repair many times during the course of the game.
Usually every side will start the game with 1 stronghold (town) and maybe a village near and other lots of neutral structures all over the map (like strongholds, villages, outposts, shipyards) that you and your opponents can capture.
There are 2 types of resources, food and gold. Food is produced in villages, gold is produce in strongholds. Food is used for population increase and for army support. Gold is used to upgrade structures, train and upgrade units, hire heroes, etc. The quantities of food or gold produced depend on the population of villages or strongholds, more villagers, bigger production.
The main advantage of a hero is ability to attach up to 50 units to him which will receive some of the hero’s experience like bonus to their own and you can arrange them in 3 formations, every formation with additional bonus when used with stand ground command. So my advice is to use more armies attached to heroes for a better survival, then armies with many units without a leading hero. And of course, don’t forget to get some mules with food with you to keep your army fed.
All units can have 1 attack type (slashing or piercing) and 2 types of defense, but usually all units (excepting heroes) have a better defense only against 1 attack type, while 2nd defense is lower or even 0 (zero).
As i said on beginning i played this game few years ago, so most of things i wrote here are from memories i recovered after i played tutorial again and from in-game help. And there are many other things i didn’t cover because i need to play and read game help more to remember all that things.
Like in any other game, you will need a little patience until you will learn how things are going and to get used with that older, but beautiful graphic and after this you will have lots of hours of fun with it, even if graphic is older (i tried many times when i played that tutorial to use mouse scroll to zoom camera in or out like in 3d games :) ).
Note: I have played much of the adventure at this point and am writing this review off of my experience with that and the tutorial.... full review
Graphics (3/5): What's there is good, but I'm left wanting more. I want moving details on these buildings - rather than seeing a static forge attached to the blacksmith, I imagine seeing a man come out and work it - little details like that make any game a whole lot better, and the lack there-of in Celtic Kings disappoints because the rest is so promising. In addition, the terrain doesn't change much and, while that may be realistic (not sure), it's not very pleasing to the eye. That said, animations are beautiful and the game looks wonderful besides the lack of any animation to buildings.
Sound (2/5): I'm a student studying and learning sound design for films, and this game just plain disappoints in the sound department. Vocalizations are strange, awkward, and often become annoying. The music, while good for a while, becomes repetitive and stays repetitive (from what I've heard in the adventure there is one track of music for this entire game). Combat sounds serve their purpose, but are also extremely limited in variety.
Gameplay (2/5) : Units run out of food too quickly. Way too quickly. In addition, they move too slowly. Sure, you could turn game speed up. And then everything looks like it's fast-forwarded. Your old druid looks like a robot trying its darnedest to walk as fast as it can without running. For the animations to look good and function correctly, you basically have to play the game at default (very slow) speed. It becomes tedious (especially in a game that tends to encourage so much exploration but often leaves that exploration unrewarded for long minutes). Often, unit type and description don't seem to make much sense. For example, today I sent a mixed group of spearmen and axemen into a group of teuton raiders. Not a single axeman died, but they cut through the spearmen (which, even in the in-game description, are supposed to counter cavalry) like an obese child through chocolate cake. I was excited about the Druid unit, but for all its cool abilities, it's is also about as tough as I am - it crumples after a few hits from some horsemen, and I've yet to find a mass that can block a unit's beeline toward the weak old magic man. This makes investment in it and its abilities costly and risky, and overall too much of a trouble to bother with - there is no reason to use them unless they're contrived for the adventure objectives.
Summary: The 2d is beautiful, but will also leave you wishing that it were more-so. It's a tease that doesn't ultimately deliver. The sound is mediocre to bad. The gameplay can be summarized as tedious. It's a fun game to look at but not very great to play, and with its limited palates and unit variety, it probably won't last you very long.
After reading around on the net for some reviews for this game, it sounded like they'd managed to pull off the whole RTS / RPG crossover rather successfully, so I had high hopes. The game looks good (for a sprite based game), the presentation was pretty slick, and everything worked smoothly on Vista straight away.... full review
Everything seemed pretty kosher, but then at Map 2 in the Adventure mode the difficulty for me just sky-rocketed. I got slaughtered over and over again and just couldn't seem to progress. When I finally did, the next mission got me slaughtered over and over...
Its entirely possible I missed a trick somewhere (I'm not a hardcore RTS fan normally), but it just seemed there was no way I could progress without adhering to some kind of "magic solution".
I've read stories of people loving this game, and it's supposed to progress well and be a great laugh with some pretty deep later game play, but for after 2 days of frustration, I had to un-install. If anyone would care to message me or the like with advice and a basic getting started guide (the tutorial didn't really seem to cover all aspects..), then I'd be happy to hear it!
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