Alexander - The Heroes Hour Review

Written by: Tracy Bosworth Posted: 7th January 2008

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PC Strategy game review.

Alexander - The Heroes Hour Details:

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	Strategy
	PC
	Meridian93
	Deep Silver

12+

Out Now

N/A

As there are so many similar RPG’s on the market, developers must get a real headache when trying to work out how to make theirs stand out from the crowd! What can they make different? What can they add that the others don’t have? Unfortunately, Alexander: The Hero’s Hour does nothing new, but does offer a complex series of menus and a control system that often frustrates! Obviously this is hardly a good thing.

The games story focuses on the time period surrounding the Persian War! King Phillip II started one of the biggest wars in history but didn’t live to see it through, his son Alexander the Great was declared king, and went on to conquer the better part of the known world, with the aim of uniting all nations to form one huge empire.

Players take on the responsibility of guiding three elite guard units, carrying out Alexander’s various orders and requests. The three characters are your average RPG heroes, you have your muscle (Megacles, skilled with heavy weapons and increased strength), sword fighter (Ekhedem, obviously skilled with swords and is an all round experienced fighter) and range fighter (Bilikidi, your average feminine cross-bow user, useful for distanced attacks).

The first thing I noticed about the game was the limited options in the starting menu, there are only two playing options, Arena and Campaign mode. Arena basically pits your character against an onslaught of enemies, winning trophies for defeating them. In Campaign mode you play through the games story, there is also an optional tutorial which is worth a look as the games menu system is extremely complex! Despite playing the tutorial I still had trouble getting to grips with Alexander – The Heroes Hour, controlling the characters was painfully frustrating at times! Dragging an area around the three of them was supposed to group them together but more often than not, one would stay put and the others might run ahead or walk off in opposite directions! Trying to select an individual character is difficult, as sometimes you’ll have to click three or four times before he’ll actually highlight.

Scattered around the environment and sometimes left behind from fallen enemies are pieces of equipment, objects and potions which can be picked up via the right mouse button, again the problem exists where the game will randomly decides you can’t pick an item up, even if your inventory is empty! Try again with a different character and he will immediately pick it up, it is all very annoying!

As in most RPG’s characters gain experience points and level-up throughout, points can be assigned to specific statistics improving things like strength, stamina and dexterity as well as shield skill and hit points. Higher level characters are able to use better equipment such as more powerful weapons and armour. As you would expect potions enable you to heal and increase things like stamina, although a character can die during battle, as long as at least one member of the team remains standing the fallen hero’s will come back to life (with zero health) as soon as the battle is over, meaning you don’t have to fuss about keeping them all alive.

Actual battles are far too complicated to pull off properly, each character has a set of special skills besides their normal hack and slash, but you have to go through several different menus without the game being paused to find each one! While you’re doing that your characters are being slashed to pieces! There’s also a button you need to press to get your characters in an aggressive mood making their attacks stronger and faster, but surely this should happen automatically when entering combat mode? It’s also difficult trying to persuade all three characters to attack at the same time, since one of them will often take on the bad guys alone whilst the others stand and watch, or simply run around in circles. Enemies have little intelligence but will notice your presence before you’re stood on their feet, however they don’t make any special attempt to outsmart you, but then RPG’s rarely have mini Einstein’s running around the wastelands!

The missions in the game require you to fulfil specific objectives for Alexander, the first one being to rid the town and surrounding area of bad guys before a wedding takes place. A big problem here emerged when the game failed to realise the task had been completed and I could not progress any further! Admittedly there is a patch for this, so it’s easily fixed, but this is only one example of the kind of bugs in the game.

Graphically Alexander: The Heroes Hour is a little basic, it’s all set in 3D but there’s no real texture or detail in the environments or character models. Even the menu looks like it’s been taken from a 10 year old game.

Sound wise the game has very little to offer, dialogue is dealt with in text form rather than being voice acted, and background music is your average sword bearing, potion drinking RPG soundtrack that becomes more upbeat during battle, but still fails to be memorable.

On the whole Alexander: The Hero’s Hour seems too rushed and thrown together to actually deserve a good write-up! Sluggish character control, numerous bugs and badly thought out menu systems make the game too frustrating to actually enjoy, there are many RPG’s out there and this one had to be really good to standout, unfortunately Alexander, known as the military genius who conquered the world, has this time failed to make an impact!