We've played Seven Kingdoms, and you, sir, are no Seven Kingdoms.
It is an absolute mystery as to why this game carries the Seven Kingdoms label. It's not like the franchise was ever a household name; even during the series' heyday it was never a sales blockbuster. Worse, Conquest has nothing to do with Trevor Chan's cult-classic series of the late 1990s. That game was built upon a solid foundation of military, diplomatic and economic principles with civilizations like the Mayans, Japanese, Persians and Greeks battling it out in real time. It was a hardcore RTS for fans of history. Seven Kingdoms: Conquest is also a real-time strategy game, but that's about the only thing that the two have in common.
You no longer have to worry about "seven" kingdoms as here it's the humans (in various guises) against the demons in a tug-of-war battle for supremacy over a land you don't particularly care about. The game wastes no time at all in letting you know that the waters are going to be more than a wee bit choppy because the tutorial is broken. After spending ten minutes "learning" the camera and unit basics, you're tasked with attacking a village that cannot be reached due to a closed stone gate. There's no way around it. No way to destroy it. It's just... there. So you're left to quit after learning a whole lot of nothing. It's never a good sign when the tutorial doesn't even work.
Conquest itself is a fairly basic RTS that uses gold and food as its two main resources; there's no peasant-pushing involved as the farms and mines generate (seemingly limitless) goods on their own which are used to build units. You can upgrade your troops, which in turn make them better fighters and tougher to kill. Toss in priests and hero units and you have a run-of-the-mill real-time strategy game.
There are a few clever ideas, such as the maps being peppered with independent villages that can be conquered either via military force of through diplomacy, (basically by paying them off) and the AI will even ally with other players during skirmish games. The gameplay feels so incredibly tired and listless, however, that you feel like you're playing a decade-old game. Everything is utterly lifeless.
The game comes with a fog-of-war option that allows you to view the CPU's location. This can be a useful tool when learning the basics to see how the computer manages its empire. Sadly, if you take after the computer you'll end up being strung up by your own citizens. The AI is absolutely horrid and will build small waves of units that attack villages and retreat without accomplishing anything whatsoever. It also struggles in upgrading its army so while it's still using low level spearmen you're assaulting it with hordes of advanced units. The unit pathfinding is so poor that you'll swear you stepped into a time machine and were whisked away back to 1997; actually, the original Seven Kingdoms (which was released that year) had far superior pathfinding than Conquest.
The hits keep coming with graphics and sounds, where nothing stands out. Conquest has absolutely nothing to hang its hat on, not one area where you can say, "Well, they did a really great job with..." Combat sounds are your standard grunts and clanking sounds of swords hitting armor, the graphics are dated, and animations are stiff and robotic. The landscapes are colorful and look pretty good, but the unit models are like the rest of the game: they're stuck in the past. You know there's a problem when the best thing about a game's visual appeal is that the trees are a cool-looking reddish-brown.
Multiplayer is fairly pointless since no one is playing the game and there's no built-in matchmaking service to find any other hapless gamers who might have spent $40 on this thing. When you toss in the fact that the game is highly unstable and prone to numerous fatal crash bugs you've got a game that's best left on the shelf.
Conquest is frustrating because a true update to the original series with modern design elements and sharp graphics would be a welcome sight for any real-time strategy fan. To drop this game on the public is a low blow to anyone who remembers the old game. Not even at a discount bargain-bin price is Seven Kingdoms: Conquest worth the time, money or effort.
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