Rising Kingdoms

The Good
It was fun for the most part. Actually, that's my main criteria when it comes to determining a game's value, so this is a good thing. Having hero units is a frequently used concept in RTSes these days, but I found some of their abilities creative and useful, so I'll give them a thumbs up as well. Same goes for some of the units/upgrades. The ability to capture independent colonies to be able to recruit certain units and to gain certain special bonuses, while not entirely new either, was a nice thing to include. I liked the strict recruitment limits as well, as they forced you to actually come up with some kind of tactics, instead of just flooding the enemy, but as usual, this is kinda limited by giving the AI exhaustive unit limits or having him ignore them altogether in some campaign levels.

The Bad
First and foremost, if you're looking for a game that introduces new concepts into the RTS genre, look elsewhere. Everything in Rising Kingdoms is essentially ripped off one game or the other. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, why fix it when it ain't broken-wise, but it might be a let down for some players. Also, in the visual department, Rising Kingdoms lags a few years behind. Personally, I think well hand-drawn graphics often look better than average 3D graphics, so I'm not too disturbed by it, but one has to admit that RTSes have gone mostly full-3D years back - I remember Tiberian Sun getting criticized for having sprite based graphics back in 1999 - so it really looks a bit old skool. Another thing that's a bit off in many parts is the balancing. Some unit/hero abilities are overpowered, to the point that once you have them, winning is just a question of time. The Foresters, for example, have a hero that can flood the map with a tower-like plant creature, which has a higher range than ordinary towers and is essentially FREE - he just needs to wait for the skill to recharge. And there are a number of abilities being just as unbalancing. OTOH, some other hero types have hardly ANY useful skill, making them essentially worthless. Unit balance is a bit better, but still, some units are far more useful than some others. I mentioned that I like the independent colony concept above, but there should have been much more colony types. As it stands, the handful of them that exist get old rather soon. Finally, another balance issue - the campaigns. The difficulty of the missions really fluctuates from easy to next-to-impossible back to easy, which is a bad thing, IMO. And, while I'm at it, the story is rather weak, lacks any kind of cutscenes or even a mere narrator, and after beating one of the campaigns, you'll get "You win!" as a text message - and that's it. Let down is the term for this, in my book.

The Bottom Line
Don't be fooled by the much longer bad section, I still liked the game - to a degree. But the oldish graphics and gameplay cannot be ignored - I'd suggest you only pick this one up if you can find it in the bargain bin, where it's destined to be by now, anyway. It's enjoyable, but cannot hope to compete with Warcraft III, which is several years older and otherwise rather comparable in gameplay terms. Do the maths.