Against Rome

Who Would you rather lead into battle? An arrow-straight rank of drilled centurions, their javelins piercing the heavens, or a horde of sweaty barbarians with bushy beards and body odour? As the name of its latest RTS suggests, the developer of Against Rome is hoping you choose the latter.

Previously responsible for the WWII stinker WarCommander, Interactive Arts has gone a fair way to making amends with this more traditional RTS. The singleplayer campaign enables you to command either the Celts, Goths or Hun as they bicker and fight with each other before setting out to bring down the Roman Empire. While you can command Roman troops in a couple of separate historical missions, their inclusion is little more than a bit-part.

What sets the game apart from the likes of Age Of Empires is the streamlined resource management. Rather than creating dozens of peasants to scour the land for wood, food and stone, resources are gathered from within your settlement. For food, build an abattoir, staff it and the food stacks up - the same goes for woodcutters' huts and mines. Resources are infinite too, which means you're free to concentrate on combat.

Unfortunately, the battles are messy affairs, with units often getting lost in the melee and little in the way of finesse. Touches like the Chieftain unit add some RPG flavour and depth to the game, but it's the game's ordinariness more than anything that comes to the fore as the campaign wears on. Shame, really.