Legions

The Good
Dont ask.

The Bad
Well lets see....... First of all I had seen an ad for this game in PC Gamer and wanted it. I went to my local store and found guess what no legions. After 3 months of not finding it I called up a used game business and purchased it for 25$. I should have payed .02$. I loaded up the game and to my horror it was like a civ desiged by the same person who made solitare. It was so cheap and stupid that to this day I could not tell you anthing about the game itself. The let down was so great from the hype that I merly threw it in my closet and never played it again. Years later I found the game during a move and placed it in its rightfull place. In the trash can.

The Bottom Line
Trashcan Bait.
Doesn't even make a good door stop.

The Good
Troop building is addictive. Conquering an island and amassing your forces before sailing to the next and dominating it is a satisfying experience, although it does predispose the game to being a little too easy. The random map generation is great. The graphics are really gory and retro looking, but they grow on you.

The Bad
The diplomacy is pretty erratic; countries will declare war on you or offer to ally for no reason, and will almost never agree with your terms of alliance. The game can be too easy if you learn to exploit certain techniques; the only hard part is usually the beginning of a game when you don't have many forces and are surrounded by enemies.

The Bottom Line
It's a simple, 2D, grid-based, turn-based strategy game in which your units are little gray blocks.

The Good
The game’s time frame begins with the early ancient world and ends with late antiquity and the Dark Ages. The designers have done fairly extensive research into their historical subject matter, and they give the player a wide variety of units and scenarios to play with. On the face of it, there is a good selection of economic and diplomatic options for the ambitious ruler. The documentation is pretty good, with lots of scenario and unit descriptions. There is also network play for conquering your friends -- in the highly unlikely event that they would have this game.

The Bad
Unfortunately, Legions suffers from numerous flaws. The graphics are merely ok—even for a turn-based wargame like this one. A very unfriendly interface makes unit movement unduly difficult. The mechanics and economics of unit production are both unclear. Diplomacy is erratic and unrewarding, since the computer opponents want you to concede far too much to ally with them, even if it is clearly in their interest to do so. To top things off, my version of the game crashed/locked up frequently, and the only released patch did absolutely nothing to fix the problem.

Oh wait, one more thing: The title is very misleading, as this game has little to do with the famed Roman legions that poor, unsuspecting history buffs will be interested in.

I can’t help but mention several titles that are clearly superior to this game in every respect. The Civilization, Age of Empires, and Impressions' City-Building Series games (Caesar, Pharaoh, etc.) are all much better and cover roughly the same time period.

The Bottom Line
There are far too many good alternatives out there, avoid this buggy and boring game.