Invictus: In The Shadow Of Olympus (PC Game)
Reviewed by Brian Schell
"Enlist the mightiest of heroes in your
epic struggle to ascend to Olympus"
The storyline in Invictus revolves around a competition between the Goddess Athena and the God Poseidon. Poseidon wants to wipe out humanity and Athena wants to save it. If Athena can find one warrior to lead an army that can defeat Poseidon, humanity is saved. If not, we're all dead. You are that hero...
Very little about this game is truly original, but it does an effective job of mixing elements of several other games into unique and mostly successful blend. Take the 3D perspective view from any of the MYTH games, mix in Heroes, a la Heroes of Might and Magic, stir in the graphics of Total Annihilation: Kingdoms and you wind up with Invictus.
The game is played on a 3D battlefield very much similar to Myth: The Fallen Lords and similar games. The battlefield and units are seen at an overhead angle and can be rotated, zoomed, and you can change the angle of the perspective. The views and graphics are not particularly attractive, and the whole game looks a little dated.
The tutorial mission is quite good, covering all the controls and features of the game. The characters in the tutorial are entertaining and the tutorial is very easy to follow. This would be an excellent introduction to the whole real-time strategy genre and I strongly recommend it for a "first real-time strategy game" for beginners.
You select and control your battle units just as in most other real-time strategy games and the usual options are included; i.e. Ctrl-# for group assignment, waypoints, click to attack, etc. The standard array of warriors such as horsemen, axe men, swordsmen, archers and Centaurs are available for purchase between levels. You also meet up with various heroes, such as Achilles, Electra, Orion, Perseus and several others. Your troops can be upgraded and enhanced between missions, and many of the character & artifact management tricks in the game Heroes of Might and Magic can be very useful here. The storyline and mission narration are very similar to those found in Total Annihilation: Kingdoms.
The best strategy I've found is to simply attack everything that moves, and as your units start to take damage, pull them back and let fresh troops continue the battle. The enemies don't appear to be smart enough to chase down individual damaged units, but seem to prefer to simply attack whoever is closest. So pull those weakened units away from the battle, and as soon as the mission is over they will be fully healed and can be upgraded for the next battle. If all your units are heavily damaged then you can rely on your Heroes and their special powers- Hercules can smash the ground to create Earthquakes, Electra can zap a group of enemies with lightning and so forth.
Bottom line- If you liked both the character building aspects of Heroes Of Might & Magic and the gameplay of the Myth series of games, you'll be sure to like it. Although the graphics seem a little outdated, the gameplay is straightforward and overall fairly addictive.
Invictus: In The Shadow of Olympus by Interplay
Requires: Windows 95/98, 266+ Mhz processor, 64MB RAM, DirectX 6 Certified Video Card and Sound Card
For More Info: http://www.interplay.com/invictus
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