“Oh no,” some of you might say, “Not another crappy movie license…”. Yes, the upcoming historical RTS game Alexander from developer GSC GameWorld and publisher Ubi Soft is designed as a movie tie-in to the upcoming movie starring Colin Farrell and directed by Oliver Stone. Some of you may have played the demo of the game that was released earlier this week but Ubi Soft allowed HomeLAN access to a build of the upcoming game with some more content than the public demo has, including a mission from the game Indian Campaign.
A quickie history lesson; both the movie and the game Alexander are based on the true life story of the Greek Empire leader known as Alexander the Great who attempted to rule the known world back around 300 B.C. The game itself has a lot of history lessons about the famous ruler while you play the four single player campaigns. In addition to Alexander’s campaign and the Indian campaign, both the Egyptians and Persians get separate campaigns as well. Alexander will also have a number of multiplayer maps that can also be used as single player skirmish maps.
If you download the demo you can get the sense of the game’s gameplay, which is not much different than most RTS titles. Peasants build structures and mine resources, structures build and train troops and hero units (including Alexander) have some special abilities of their own. In playing the mission from the Indian campaign that is not available in the public demo, we got to play the battle from the Indian side as they attempted to keep Alexander’s armies from crossing the river into their territory. In addition to typical infantry units like spearmen, bowman and swordmen, the Indian side also has access to chariots, horses and the big guns of the time, elephants.
Graphically, the game uses GSC GameWorld’s engine that has been used to great effect in their best selling Cossacks series. As a result the 2D graphics don’t perhaps have the punch that, say, Rome: Total War has. However, the developer makes the most of what they have for Alexander with some detailed maps, some nice water effects and the fact that there can be literally thousands of units on the screen at once with little to no frame rate effect.
Aside from a image of Farrell’s version of Alexander in cut-scenes, there really seems to be very little connection between the movie and game but based on playing the press preview build, GSC GameWorld and Ubi Soft may be able to craft a good old fashioned and fun RTS title from this loose movie license. Alexander is scheduled to be released the same time the movie heads to theaters in late November.
INFORMATION ABOUT THIS CONTENT:
Originally posted: homelanfed.com (LINK) (ARCHIVED)
Date of publish: 05.11.2004
Author: John “JCal” Callaham
Language of publish: english