Ancient Wars: Sparta IGN Review

Filed in archive Game Reviews on May 8, 2007

IGN's tagline says it all: "This is not Sparta, This is boredom". If you loved the recent 300 movie and expected something similar then youre in for a terrible disappointment, Ancient Wars: Sparta is basically a game that borrows features from older games but not doing enough on its own to warrant a purchase.

Ancient Wars: Sparta takes place during the period of Xerxes and Leonidas. The conflict between the Greeks and the Persians of this time has become legendary thanks to the famed battle of Thermopylae where 300 Spartans (in reality they were accompanied by a couple thousand more troops from around Greece) held a narrow passage against an army of Persians nearly one million strong. The game presents three campaigns following the Spartans as they unite and then fight the Persians, Egyptians as they struggle to gain a life out from under the crushing boot of King Xerxes, and finally the Persians and Xerxes rise to power and ambition. The stories in each campaign are told through pre-compressed cutscenes that use in-game assets. Unfortunately they're compressed to hell and back and look terrible when playing on decent sized monitor.