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Warrior of Rome II review

Game: Warrior of Rome II
Platform: Genesis
Genre: Strategy
Developer: Micronet
AKA: Caesar no Yabou II (JP)

Reader review by pickhut

May 07, 2007

I was curious.

Warrior of Rome was one of the worst games I've experienced on the Genesis, and for the longest time, I could not get over the fact that it actually spawned a sequel. I didn't want to try it out at first after I went through the horrorfest of the original, but after awhile, I couldn't resist. It had to be an improvement over the first, I thought. Well, when I finally got around to buying it (insanity, I know), popped it into my half-broken Genesis 2, and turned it on... wow. Warrior of Rome II has one of the most unintentionally hilarious openings I've ever seen. After you get past the SEGA logo, the developer's name, Micronet, shows up in giant letters, slowly moving across the screen from right to left.

Yes, like Rocky. As crazy as it sounds, it's almost like they were proud to show off their name like that, thinking that they may have created one of the greatest real-time strategy games of all time, Warrior of Rome. As hard as it was, I tried to stay optimistic at this point and proceeded on with the game. Seconds later, I started a mission... and it was a pain in the butt to play. Which was amazing, considering the two goals sounded insanely easy: destroy the enemy fortresses and then their troops.

However, it turns into a headache-inducing nightmare. As you start a mission, you begin with a small fortress and four units. You can have up to 20 units, but you need to have a considerable amount of villages surrounding your fortress to build up this army, which takes time. So, trying to make good use with what you currently have, you order some of your units in the direction of the enemy fortress. This in itself is a struggle, because the units move at an insanely slow pace and they have this bad habit of wandering off course. I remember this one time I ordered a unit to the north where a small enemy fortress was nearby. The unit went in the right direction at first, but started going west afterwards. And for the hell of it, they started fighting an enemy unit along the way. After maybe 10 minutes, the unit made it to their destination... which should have originally taken 5 minutes.

Once you finally make it to the fortress with your units, destroying it won't be so easy. Attacking it while enemy troops are guarding it is suicide. You'll be slaughtered within just a few minutes, making your long, boring trip one huge time waster. The best thing you can do is wait until they wander off to another section of the map, and once they leave, tearing it down in a time-consuming fashion will be insanely easy. But there's a catch: as you rip that fortress a new one, those enemy units that wandered off were actually building a new fortress. This happens all the time. Now you're gonna have to repeat everything again: walk a long distance, wait for the enemy to wander off, and destroy the fortress. Of course, by the time you're finished tearing down this other fortress, the enemy would already be halfway done building two more...

You're stuck. The developer,

,

made the game in such a way that, even if you tried your very best, you'll be stuck having to destroy multiple fortresses for hours. I gave up on the game after completing the first mission when I realized I had to go through 14 more missions of this same stuff. The original's four missions look like a blessing in comparison. Actually, WoRII ends up making the entire first game look good, which is an amazing accomplishment. It's still a crappy game, but at least it was epic in its crappiness. Warrior of Rome II, on the other hand, is just crappy.

It does have an amusing sound test screen, however. It's not everyday you see Roman soldiers dancing to the beat of a game's soundtrack!

Rating: 1/10

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