Hegemony: Philip of Macedon

There Are Periods of history that are ignored by developers, generally they prefer to stick to the established eras so as to maximise potential sales. There's no point doing an historical strategy game based on a minor battle in the Boer War when you can churn out another World War II RTS and grab plaudits. Naturally then, nobody bothers with Philip of Macedon when his son, young Alexander the show-off, conquered the ancient world and ended up embalmed in honey. That's where Longbow Games have decided to strike out in a bold new direction, focusing on Daddy Macedon rather than his offspring.

You take control of Philip and set about rebuilding his empire in Total War style. But Hegemony has got just as many elements of more action-oriented strategy titles, like Command & Conquer games, as it does with Creative Assembly's historical epics.

While there's a funky zooming thing going on between the campaign map and the battle map - both being one and the same in essence - everything is played out in real-time. In some ways, this doesn't work as well as it could, because you get lulled into a relaxed, carefully considered style of play, when really you should be playing like you're in C&C instead. There is a pause option to allow you to consider your moves, but this can end up being forgotten about.

General Papa

As the interface is a little fiddly it's easy to make errors during the more intense scrums, accidentally dragging units into the wrong place or selecting the wrong ones in the heat of battle. As well as this, the choice of subject matter - original as it is - limits how diverse the game can be. Unlike in Rome: Total War, you haven't got the variety of units from exotic parts of an empire to play with, just bog-standard hoplites, spearmen and peltasts. The economic elements of the campaign map are reasonably done though, seeing you manually create trade routes and linking farms with your cities. Hegemony doesn't have anywhere near the polish, variety or "play me, play me!" factor of Total War games, and so it's difficult to recommend it when Rome is so cheap now. That said it's a decent strategy offering, but limited by it's admirable attempt to go where few developers have gone before.