Spartan: Total Warrior
How do you translate a PC strategy game to consoles?
Tags: Spartan: Total Warrior Categories: PS2 Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Nov 28th, 2005
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Spartan: Total Warrior (title page) | 1 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Action | No | ||
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Creative Assembly are the folks behind the TOTAL WAR series of PC strategy war titles, including ROME: TOTAL WAR, which this site and this reviewer analyzed last year. But when they joined forces with Sega to take the series to consoles instead of PCs, the problem they had was that PC war strategy titles don’t always translate well to consoles. So instead of keeping the game a strategy offering, they decided to go more action-based and modeled the newly-retitled SPARTAN: TOTAL WARRIOR after games like Koei’s DYNASTY WARRIORS series, or Sony’s GOD OF WAR.
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The result is a fairly standard action title that tries to stand out from the crowd, but lacks the historical accuracy and attention to detail that made the PC strategy titles so appealing. In place of historical accuracy and appeal, Spartan: Total Warrior gives way to the realm of myth and fantasy as the nameless hero, Spartan, is offered the chance to be rewarded by Ares, the Greek god of war, if Spartan goes out and rains hell down on the Roman Army. Along the way, there’s magic, zombies, skeletons and historically-inaccurate weapons tossed in along the way, in order to add spectacle. While this tends to put the game into a more familiar and comfortable category for action gamers, it also makes the title more generic and less appealing as a result.
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This slight misfire is similar to what happened when the Baldur’s Gate series was brought over from PC to console systems; the developers assumed a turn-based game wouldn’t deliver enough thrills to console gamers and turned their series into a Gauntlet clone. As a result, what had been one of the most popular and respected PC RPG series of the past decade became “just another Gauntlet clone,” even in the eyes longtime fans who wanted to see Baldur’s Gate on consoles. The translation stripped out so much of what made it unique, it lost its appeal. The same thing has happened here; the Total War games are appealing because Creative Assembly is passionate about history and historical accuracy; if their game was set in Bronze Age II, you wouldn’t see any Iron Age I weapons. That made the game feel authentic and fun. In the console version at issue in this review, all that attention to history is tossed in favor of making the game more, “Kickass!”
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While it may work for some fans of action games, the trouble is that the newly-revisioned series doesn’t really have an identity of its own anymore; with historical accuracy gone, the hero they offer up is nameless and generic, meaning there is little empathy to toss his way as he quests to tear down Rome. In fact, no overwhelming element of the game rises to the surface to make Spartan: Total Warrior a game unique enough to stand out from the crowd. That makes the game devolve into a rather standard action title with average graphics and a standard battle system; in all, it feels more like the games it mimics, rather than feeling like it’s own game. Spartan: Total Warrior feels more like the answer to the question of, “What would Dynasty Warriors look like if it were set in the Roman Empire?”
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This may not make Spartan: Total Warrior a bad game, per se; it’s not. But it does mean it is a game in search of an identity and is more likely to be thought of as a clone of more successful games in the same genre. That’s too bad, because the Total War series doesn’t deserve to become a game that is compared to other series. Sure, there are some cool boss battles and the historical slant is nice, but with all the fantasy stuff tossed in, especially without the limits of historical accuracy imposed, the game just blends into the standard action genre, rather than standing out from the crowd. In the end, while Spartan: Total Warrior began as a nice experiment to branch the series into the console world, the way in which it was realized and executed simply doesn’t work as well as one might wish.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
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+ Lots of enemies on the screen at the same time, smoothly animated. + Some of the boss battles and mission variety are interesting. |
7.2 |
| What Doesn't | |
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– The game feels more like a clone of Dynasty Warriors and God of War than a game with its own identity. – Sacrificing historical accuracy was a big misstep. |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| Spartan: Total Warrior could have been a lot better if the hero – and the game itself – had more personality. | |
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Tags: Spartan: Total Warrior
Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Nov 28th, 2005 and is filed under PS2 Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
