Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising
- July 18, 2007 00:00 AM PST
As the son or daughter of a Roman God, your task is to help defeat the corrupt Telchines who have overcome banishment to come scuffle with the Olympians once more.
Luckily, being offspring of the all-powerful and immortal comes with perks, but you'll still have to do some quests, level up, and stay in favor.
We're not in Azeroth Anymore
While the Roman mythology scene is a familiar one of late, Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising is using it in a new way, for an MMO--although we'll see how it competes with Age of Conan next year. Further differentiating it, however, is the strategic squad-based combat. Throughout the world are minions for players to acquire, whether by hiring them as mercenaries or questing to gain their support. Minions equal customization; back in your camp you'll be able to house and outfit all 130 unique guys, but even at the highest levels you're allowed only four to take with you, so the idea is to pick and level minions that serve your purposes the best. Having a healer is always good, and it's great to take helpers with feats that stack and enhance the buffs or debuffs you're throwing out.
At a recent press event we got some hands-on time, including a first look at some higher level play. For starters, though, they set us up with a level five--about the time you get your first minion. Luckily, ours was a healer, so even when four big, squishy-looking octopus-crab monsters came to attack us, we managed to survive. After a not-so-long walk on the beach, we tooled around a shanty town and clashed with some elbow-fighter thugs. It could be that a graphic was missing, but while elbows might not cut you like a sword, they still hurt.
Moving Up in the World
Soon it was time to take a level jump up to twenty, but technical issues kept us from experiencing too much of that. The game is still in closed beta and there are obviously plenty of things to tweak before release this fall. Before the night ended, though, we did get to jump into the final minutes of a 40+ instance.
Ideally you'd be taking four other players and their four minions each, for a total of twenty-five characters. For our demo, we were rather understaffed. Although two groups of five were arranged, the rest of us present had to band together in a three (fifteen) man group, meaning taking out Chalcon, the Telchine Goddess of Nightmares was going to be pretty much out of the question. Heck, we could hardly take Dread Razer, her multi-headed guardian dog-reptile-monster.
The thing that probably made us smile the most was the awesome new squad dance video. If you thought seeing your WoW characters get down and funky was a riot, imagine your personal army busting out into Thriller.
Assuming all goes well this fall, we're told to expect Egyptian, Barbarian, and even Chinese expansions, including contested territory. It's good to be ambitious, but Rome wasn't built in a day, so we hope they take care of that, first.
