Each territory offers unique bonuses to the owner, from powers you can use during a battle to upgrade points you can spend between fights to enhance your units' effectiveness or increase the size of your starting forces. The campaign follows the Conquer the World style where you're presented with a turn-based map of each theater. The third and final campaign sees the Cuotl drawn in to the conflict and it's here that you'll more or less settle your score. As you move on to the second campaign, you'll find yourself allied with the Alim and become aware that there's more at stake here than your own personal vendetta. You start off leading the forces of the Vinci in a simple quest for revenge. There are a few surprises here and there but the story itself is really only an excuse to tie the different campaigns together. I won't give away any real details on the story here, because you can kind of see it coming within the first few hours anyway. It would be much more compelling if the game presented you with more opportunities to lead the units of one civ against those of another. Unfortunately, as the three campaigns put you in charge of each of these civilizations in turn, you'll mostly be fighting units from the same civilization you're playing. With each civilization representing a unique play style, getting a handle on the match-ups that work best can take a little while. They become almost unstoppable once they've unlocked the more advanced technologies. Things like mobile barracks make them almost as fluid as the Alim but the Cuotl aren't quite as powerful in the early stages of a game. The massive stone statues that make up their armies mix nicely with the orbital lasers, cloaking devices and power shields they have available. The final civilization is the Cuotl, a combination of ancient Mesoamerican influences and highly advanced technology. They also love stuff that can fly, so you'll definitely want to protect against that if you know they're coming for you. They also have their own unique play style, which is much more fluid and rush-friendly than the Vinci. Their Arabian aesthetic includes things like floating palaces, fiery serpents and gigantic scorpions which all contrasts nicely with the Vinci. The magical Alim civilization draws from the tales of the 1001 Nights. They're largely a research-oriented civ that can specialize in a variety of areas. The game, however, adds in a healthy dose of advanced retro science in the form of clockwork soldiers, steam-powered tanks and flying units inspired by Da Vinci's own designs. The Vinci are obviously based on Renaissance Italy, at least in terms of their politics and culture. Still, the civilizations themselves are pretty damn interesting both in terms of their individual flavors and their abilities. The only real downside to the original setting is that there's very little sense of history or connection among the different peoples of Rise of Legends. To be fair, the new types certainly draw inspiration from existing traditions but that only makes them more effective in terms of giving players an idea of what to expect. Given the overabundance of stock settings, it's nice to see Rise of Legends invent an entirely new set of civilizations that are just as interesting and compelling as more familiar types. One of the best features of Rise of Legends is that there's not a single elf archer, Nazi tank or Space Marine in sight. Happily, that's not the case with the unfortunately titled sequel, Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends. Still, the game's historical setting lent it a sort of predictability that wore thin for some gamers. The game's synthesis of real-time strategy gameplay with concepts popularized by turn-based strategy games like Civilization resulted in one of the more unique RTS experiences of the last few years. Big Huge Games' Rise of Nations was a big huge hit.
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