Publisher/Developer: GameLoft
Genre: Real Time Strategy
Price: $4.99
Verdict: Fun strategy game that although a little short, is well worth a look.
Pros: Just like Warcraft 2! Well, sort of.
Cons:Once you’ve completed it, there’s nothing else to do.

Loading up Rise of Lost Empires was initially a huge breath of fresh air for me. It instantly reminded me of such classics as Warcraft 2, just on my iPhone rather than my PC screen. I had a feeling I was onto a good thing with this game, and for the most part, I was right.

Rise of Lost Empires offers 2 campaigns, human and orcs, comprising of 10 missions for each race. Initially only the human campaign is open for play, but after reaching the halfway point, the Orc campaign opens up. Once you’ve finished the two campaigns, you’ll have dealt with 20 different units, built 20 different buildings and played 6 heroes. Not bad at all for the price. As you can see from the screenshots, it really does look like Warcraft 2. Each Chapter starts with a brief text description setting the scene for the next battle against the Orcs/Humans. Each unit is small but detailed. It holds a lovely, unique charm that you can’t help but appreciate if you’ve played an RTS game set in a medieval world such as this. Even the music is charming and just what you would expect to hear in a game like this. It has obviously been developed by fans of RTS games from the 1990s. The early missions of the human campaign quickly educate you upon how to play the game, and most features are fairly intuitive. Selecting individual units was as simple as tapping on them and a second simple tap directed them across the map. Constructing buildings was simple as well. The only slight irritant that I found was when trying to select more than one unit at a time. To do so, required using two fingers. One to open the rectangular unit selection box (as made famous by every RTS game, ever) and one to show how far you wish to stretch the box. It might have just been my clumsy fingers but I did find it awkward the first few times, so I’m guessing someone with bigger hands than my girly hands would have more trouble than that, which could make things annoying! It’s a minor problem however, and for the most part the controls work well, and are introduced through a keen and accommodating learning curve.

There were also a few features I would have liked to have seen, which will hopefully feature in future updates. It would be nice to have the added strategical element of being able to command your units to hold their ground, as seen in other similar games. As well as that, the ability to repair buildings would have been nice. The lack of these two features reared their ugly head in one of the earlier missions in the human campaign. The mission instructed me to guard my citadel until reinforcements arrived, giving me five minutes to hold out. It was a fairly simple mission to complete, but I’d have liked to have instructed my units to hold ground near the citadel rather than watch them wander off chasing after some Orcs, leaving the citadel open to attack. When the citadel inevitably was attacked, I would have liked to have been able to repair it once I’d killed the invaders, even if I was only able to repair it to a certain percentage.

Despite the minor failings, I did still really enjoy Rise of Lost Empires. It offered a nice, wide selection of mission types. Perhaps, it could have offered more, but it was nice to see more than just ‘Kill the enemy’ type missions, offering escort missions and defend your base style missions. Arguably, the game could have been a little longer as I didn’t find it took a huge length of time to complete the game, as the majority of missions are quite simple to complete. However, Rise of Lost Empires is good fun, at a reasonable price and ideal for a commuter game. My only real hope for it is that in a future update, a skirmish mode or multiplayer mode could be added, as currently, there’s not much reason to go back to this title once you’ve finished the two campaigns.