This is not madness, this is boredom.
With the release of the movie 300, Spartans rekindled a glorious (if warped) life in the general population's imagination. Unfortunately, the recently released Ancient Wars: Sparta isn't going to help promote much fascination with the time period. This is a game we've all played before in virtually every aspect. Combat is dull and devoid of many of the tactical trickeries that we see in many other real-time strategy titles and the campaigns, while occasionally interesting, don't provide a consistent stream of entertainment. Even one of the most interesting ideas in the game that allows players to outfit their own armies with different types of weapons and armor suffers because of the lack of focused units with purpose.
Ancient Wars: Sparta takes place during the period of Xerxes and Leonidas. The conflict between the Greeks and the Persians of this time has become legendary thanks to the famed battle of Thermopylae where 300 Spartans (in reality they were accompanied by a couple thousand more troops from around Greece) held a narrow passage against an army of Persians nearly one million strong. The game presents three campaigns following the Spartans as they unite and then fight the Persians, Egyptians as they struggle to gain a life out from under the crushing boot of King Xerxes, and finally the Persians and Xerxes rise to power and ambition. The stories in each campaign are told through pre-compressed cutscenes that use in-game assets. Unfortunately they're compressed to hell and back and look terrible when playing on decent sized monitor.
The only way to speed up incredibly long training and upgrading processes is to gather the weapons and shields of fallen enemies in order to add them to the build queue. Not only does collecting these items make build times shorter for the units that use them, but also makes them much less expensive. It still can be a chore collecting the things when workers have to run halfway across the map to your home base. Constructing a new home base can be cost prohibitive as well as collecting gold can take a serious amount of time.
Sadly, one of the most interesting features also causes one of the game's worst problems. It's the unit design. Each of the factions has light, medium, and heavily armed warriors. Each of these basic types can be outfitted with several different types of weapons. Training a warrior from the basic infantry structure will give them melee first priorities while the ranged training facility will allow for ranged combat first. Each of the weapon types (of which there are many) have different damage values and work better against certain types of enemies.
This kind of design also tends to muddle any uniqueness to the factions. Who cares who you're using if most of the units basically act the same? There are some difference between the factions that matter, but at a base level, I've found no reason to favor one side over the other.
Even the presentation of audio is aggravating at times. When Persians sound straight out of Monty Python, you should know you've done something wrong. Why not hire some people with the correct accents to do your voice work at least? There's a lot of people of Persian descent in the world to choose from.
Perhaps one of the most disappointing things for someone with a good computer is going to be the game's lack of support for 1920x1200 resolution. In fact, if you have a 16x10 monitor, the highest res you'll be able to play at is 1152x864 because the game won't let you choose a resolution that doesn't fit your aspect ratio. It's really too bad because the game certainly isn't ugly and would probably have looked pretty good at a higher resolution. The art won't blow anybody away but combat units and environments look decent enough to be upset by the gigantic interface that takes up way to much real estate.
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