Legion Arena (site takes some time to load up) $34.99 is a really interesting game.
It comes with movies (600MB) or without (180MB). The price is the same so if you have the space grab the “with movies” version.
To quote them, “Fans of Roman history, fans of role-playing and strategy games, fans of Naked Fanatics, will be thrilled with this exciting and incredibly well-researched game.
Legion Arena is a Role Playing Strategy game on a massive scale. Take control of a small band of warriors and train them to be the mightiest army in the world!”
I am no gaming expert. Somewhere along the line I got myself into GAP (PlayStation’s Gamer Advisory Panel), and I once spent the whole of a transatlantic flight playing Ridge Racer on my PSP (PlayStation Portable). My friends son regular beats me at pretty much every PS2 (PlayStation 2) game that we play, and I have never been into games on the PC, but I loved this game. I am not really all that keen on strategy based games either, didn’t study Roman history all that much and so all in all this game was a really pleasant surprise to me.
I played the game on a PowerBook G4 with 1.5GB RAM and with all the applications closed down it ran really well. Very smooth, no “fragging” or delays and a very clear quality display. I think the game would have been slightly easier to play with a Mouse, but as it isn’t a high action game at all then that wasn’t a problem.
Getting to grips with the game was pretty easy, mainly thanks to an excellent introductory tutorial, but mastering it was a lot more difficult – not that I would claim to be an expert at all. You have a number of options as to which side you fight on, and you can “pick and mix” your armies strengths depending on the type of battle that you are going to be involved in. The history element to the game was pretty interesting but the actual action was disappointing – not very realistic. It reminded me of a two year period in my life when I was 12-14 when I messed around with “war games” at school – all the effort goes into the planning rather than the execution in these type of games.
I was a little disappointed with the quality of the graphics. It may be that I have been spoiled with some of the excellent graphics on other games, but this seemed a little “old school” and not very realistic. I found the game addictive but not in the sit down and next thing you know 4 hours have flown past, as the “action” was very repetitive, but in a “dip in and out” kind of way. A number of the reviews that I read before, during and after my own game playing confirmed this – it isn’t a game that you would miss out on if you never played it, but it is a useful game to have tucked away on the Mac to kill the odd half hour or so.