Alexander: The Heroes Hour

This game's primary premise is extremely promising. A strategy/role-playing game set in the realm of Alexander the Great. Alexander: The Heroes Hour game offers an adventure in which you will fight with Alexander and command your heroes through an exciting campaign.

At first, it seemed that the game was promising that I'd be blown away by the fantastic 3D visuals and battles, and shiver in ecstasy at the action-packed blend of RTS and role playing. There would be numerous factions to combat, such as the Greeks, Persians, and Egyptians, as well as extremely complicated fighting abilities to master, unique pieces of equipment to gather, and difficult objectives to complete.

Weak character controls

On first viewing, I was let down. I started by playing the Tutorial to understand the basics, and I found the character controls to be clunky. Also, the Tutorial didn't do a great job at explaining how to play. The creators haven't recruited any voice actors to bring the characters to life; all you get are little text boxes.

That is a major bad sign, in my opinion. In addition, the game failed frequently throughout the first several stages. This strangely improved as I proceeded. There were a handful of 'broken quests' in the early stages, when I'd complete a goal but the quest remained 'unsolved.'

Clunky Gameplay

Controlling the heroes in combat is really difficult. You point them somewhere, and they amble off in the opposite way, concluding that the longer path is preferable. Megacles is a jerk for doing this when he should be protecting Bilikidi's back! Even if you gather them as a group and tell them to go someplace, chances are they'll all take different paths, and one of them (typically the weakest) will stumble into a swarm of slavering foes and be wrecked right away.

This is really vexing. They also move incredibly slowly, so if you direct one of them to a certain adversary, they merely saunter there at their leisure, and they always appear to take the long route around. You can make them flee by double clicking, but in a large melee situation, this isn't always optimal, especially because you'll be attempting to manage everyone else at the same time.

In comparison to games like Mount and Blade Warband, as well as Mordhau, this completely pales in comparison to the systems and intricacies those titles have set up to ensure player’s receive an immersive gameplay experience.

Awful Cutscenes

Cut scenes occur at inconvenient times, and the most vexing element of this is that the action continues while you have no control over your characters, thus you frequently return to the action only to find everyone on the verge of death, with no way to save them, and you must reload.

Pros

• Good concept

Cons

• Weak gameplay
• Bad cinematics
• Buggy
• Clunky game design

Alexander The Great is one of history's most revered military commanders, and by the time of his early death he'd conquered most of the known world, a vast empire that stretched from the Balkans to the Himalayas. He was a Cavalry commander, a king, an emperor and possibly a bit gay. He was not, as this game suggests, the head of a Greek special operations unit. Contrary to what you might expect, Alexander: The Heroes Hour (sic) doesn't allow you to play as the great Macedonian leader. Instead, you simultaneously control three of his best friends', Bilikidi, Ekhedem and Megacles, who together use their dubious skills (as archer, swordsman and barbarian, respectively) to smite Alexander's foes as he carves himself an empire.

Taking aside the setting, which has obviously been quickly erected to elicit as much money as possible on the back of a certain Hollywood blockbuster, the game is possibly one of the worst examples of action role-playing I've ever played. For a start, you can't create any characters - you start with what you're given and that's that. And yes, the experience points and dropped loot comes thick and fast, but so do the (not terribly bright) enemy soldiers: in places, these are spawned in such vast numbers that it's simply impossible to play the game.

The rest of the package is just as comedic; the manual is badly written, as is the in-game dialogue. Plus, the soundtrack is a bizarre fusion one can only describe as ambient Mediterranean folk disco -which is perhaps the most authentic part of the whole game. Avoid at all costs.