GameSpy
Review
of Spartan: Total Warrior
The
Total Warrior meets absolute mediocrity in Sega's new
Dynasty Warriors-style brawler. As an anonymous but god-blessed Greek warrior, players get to cut through hordes of Roman soldiers, none of whom is half as bothersome as
Spartan: Total Warrior's many, and debilitating, hiccups.
At first glance, the third-person
Warrior seems rather appealing in its simplicity. Enemies appear in great numbers, waiting to be cut down. Chewing a path through them with sword, shield, and bow-and-arrow proves to be great fun, and there's a definite sense of urgency imparted to all the fights. Battles are tense affairs, they're highlighted by huge explosions, crumbling towers, flying bodies, and lots of blood. The game has the good sense to keep the pressure on at all times; enemies will seek to enlist reinforcements by ringing alarms, are proficient at blocking, and will maneuver around the Spartan and his allies so as to hit from the side or rear.
Individual missions are varied enough so as to provide challenge and stave off boredom. Aside from simply slaughtering Romans, the game tasks its hero with defending gates, protecting heroes, escorting allies to safety, assaulting huge bosses, and destroying the enemy's ability to wage war by poisoning his water supply and wrecking his siege weaponry. One of the most interesting of
Warrior's challenges has the protagonist on top of a city wall repelling an enemy invasion while simultaneously attempting to destroy a rampaging golem. Here, he must drop burning oil on Roman siege engineers attempting to open the city gates while battling soldiers coming over the top, and when prompted, rush to activate three ballistas to destroy the approaching behemoth.
It would have been easy for the developers to simply let this game mire itself in an endless series of battles until its completion. That they stabbed at and largely succeeded in creating a beat-'em-up that's varied in its mission structure is an accomplishment of some note. Yet the game does not follow through. It slips up in handling some of game making's most crucial aspects -- almost as if Game Making 101, pardon the pun, was all Greek to developer The Creative Assembly.
Missions are strung together in chunks. One series of missions involves the Spartan and an ally infiltrating the Romans' camp. Initially, enemy archers must be dispatched, fire arrows retrieved, and then put to use on explosive barrels conveniently placed near a gate. After the gate is blown, the two proceed into the camp and battle more foes before exploding another gate. When the player enters the next area, the game considers this a checkpoint and saves all progress. But it also saves the hero's health as is, and if the hero's health is depleted, the player is, to put it mildly, out of luck. Because the game is, again, pardon the pun, spartan in its use of health stations, death becomes plentiful, and the experience frustrating. Worse, there are missions where success and failure are almost wholly out of the player's hands. After roughing up the Romans and acquiring a new set of blades, the hero must then escort a series of unarmed prisoners to safety. Games such as
Silent Hill 4: The Room and
State of Emergency have died great, flaming deaths because of their inability to present a semblance of artificial intelligence when it came to non-player characters who needed to be shepherded from A to B, and Spartan gleefully marches right in line with them.
It's astounding, almost like a train wreck the player can see coming, but has no power to stop. These unarmed dullards in Warrior do not stay behind their defenders. Instead, they brazenly walk up to Roman soldiers -- soldiers armed with swords and carrying full shields -- and start swinging at them. When enough of them commit suicide, the game ends, requiring the whole Bizarro World scenario be replayed again. The player, simply, must slaughter every enemy before the requisite number of lemmings goes over the proverbial cliff.
Other, smaller problems serve to dull Warrior's shine. If players opt to draw the camera out to its maximum height, they'll be plagued by banners, walls, and trees obscuring the view; in a game requiring total awareness of enemy locations during battle, this is unforgivable. If the camera is drawn down focus on the protagonist, the camera will oftentimes quickly shift its position to obtain a better view and disorienting the player. It's constantly necessary to adjust and readjust the camera's alignment, something that's not at all desirable during brawls. Even simple things like target indication when a bow is selected is implemented poorly; the game automatically selects targets, and will shift the hero's aim from, say, an explosive barrel (which when ignited can kill multiple foes) to a solitary soldier.
After such an uneven effort, there can be no other assessment made: the game gods must be displeased.
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