Alexander: The Heroes Hour review

What's in a name? Plenty, especially when the commercial success or otherwise of an unremarkable game depends upon it. In a sea of cookie cutter real-time strategy releases, a snappy title or moniker that rides the coat tails of a high profile intellectual property can make the difference between left on the shelf obsolescence and ringing cash tills.

Meridian 93’s Alexander - The Heroes Hour is one such game that unashamedly seeks to cash in on the high visibility of another product, namely Warner Brothers' similarly titled film of last year. Yet having lost out on the official movie-related license to Ubisoft, Meridian’s effort adopts a different tack, purporting to portray the events of the illustrious military commander from a more historical perspective. Unfortunately, this is something that doesn’t quite gel with the more fantastical elements of the game, but that's just one complaint among a mass of issues.

Not Spartacus

They say first impressions last, and in the case of Alexander, this isn't to the game's favour. Firing up the game for the first time, you immediately notice the lack of an introductory cut scene, with a couple of understated animations that introduce publisher and developer giving way to an ugly looking main menu screen.

From here, your choices are more limited than a gladiator's pension scheme - there's an option that takes you to the main campaign, a load game facility and some very basic provision for messing around with graphics and audio settings. Always a favourite in my book, you can also take a look at the development credits, and last but certainly by no means least, there's the quit option.

After some brief textual preamble to set the scene, the campaign throws you into a tutorial that certainly could have benefited from some voice-over work, since the onscreen instructions are often inexplicably truncated, so that you then need to hit the Tab key to see what your objective is. It's also at this point that you realise how needlessly convoluted the control scheme is. If you don’t use the keyboard shortcuts, it takes no fewer than five mouse clicks to get one of the heroes to activate a special move, by which point your enemy may have died of boredom.

It's all Greek to me

With the not so basics out of the way, you are launched into first mission set-up, another remarkably unattractive interface screen that requires you to select troops from the available pool (a whopping four in this case - three hero characters plus some grunt) for the forthcoming battle.

Did I say battle? I really meant to say wedding, since the first mission requires you to act as the bouncer at some royal type's nuptials. In essence, this involves roaming around the map, attacking anyone not wearing a pink carnation and dying frequently, since the difficulty level of the game is ridiculously high.

As hinted at above and in the game’s name, combat and the spoils of victory (or defeat) are shared between not one but three prominent characters, none of whom is the Great man himself. There's Megacles, an athletic sort who likes to show off to the ladies by knocking over several enemies at once with his bare hands, while Ekhedem aims to bedazzle the opposition with his swordsmanship, not to mention a sideline in offensive discus throwing.

Lastly, there's Bilikildl, and what she lacks in brute strength and bullheadedness she strives to make up for with her talents in stealthy backstabbing and poison distribution - just make sure she doesn’t get anywhere near the punch bowl at any post-victory celebrations.

The fella from Pella

While it may consider itself a real-time strategy game, Alexander plays more like an action RPG, superficially resembling the excellent Dungeon Siege. Enemies you've killed drop loot which you can plunder, such as health potions, armour and weapons, and you can then use this booty to improve the gear of your own charges.

Just don't expect it to radically increase the three heroes' performance in battle though, as much of their time is spent with path-finding issues, trying to circumnavigate difficult objects such as trees and other devilishly placed scenery.

Somewhat bizarrely, the game has a number of secondary objectives or even sub-games that have little relation to the main thrust. One such example involves a character who dares you to test your strength by carrying a number of pebbles from one location to another. A further instance has you frenetically bashing the mouse button to win experience toward levelling your characters up. On paper, it may have seemed that these features would have added much needed diversity to the gameplay, but in practice they seem ill conceived and tacked on.

Contrary to what the retail box would have us believe, Alexander's visuals fall more than a spear's throw short of "Fantastic, highly varied and detailed 3D graphics". Ugly presentation menus aside, however, they aren't all that bad either, and there is a reasonable amount of detail to the maps, while unit animation is smooth. Indeed, if you were to pick the best out of the game's admittedly modest assets, this would be it, but that's a bit like saying the Titanic had an excellent anti-rust coating.

Persian mug

Additionally, the sounds of battle are somewhat muted. Each of the hero characters has but a single, almost inaudible vocal utterance to make every time you click on them, while they move in complete silence.

There are no ambient sound effects to speak of, and the effect used to depict the clash of steel on steel is so generic that it might as well have been taken from the public domain. Top that lot off with a highly repetitive musical score and you have more than enough reason to pull the audio sliders all the way down to zero.

And that's about it really. A maddeningly frustrating difficulty level, less than intuitive squad control, passable graphics and minimal audio combine to make Alexander a mediocre title that - unlike its subject matter - won't stand the test of time, and will be long forgotten when the next batch of historically inspired strategy games comes around.