After the original game released all the way back in 2003, Praetorians now gets its upgrade with the HD version. Praetorians – HD Remaster is an RTS game developed by Pyro Studios and Torus Games. For many people the game was a nice entry to the RTS-genre, as the game can be seen as one of the pioneers of the genre. We also reviewed this game in the Double Pack for XBOX and you can check the review here. But let’s not waste anymore time and dive into the game.
What we liked!
- Tutorial: A very good thing about the game is the 4-part tutorial. It will make you familiar with the different troops and what they are capable of. It will also teach you some important combat lessons, like when it’s good to take a defensive stance or when it’s better to move to the higher grounds in order to get an advantage over the enemy troops. Yet sometimes the tutorial can be a bit vague but when you manage to get past that part you will most likely get an ‘’oooh is this everything’’ moment.
- Missions: Praetorians offers a wide variety of missions. After you have completed the 4-piece tutorial, there is a total of 20 extra missions to complete. In order to complete a mission, you have to meet every requirement, for example when the final objective is to kill all enemy troops and conquer every settlement. If it also states that 1 person cannot die, but someone did, you can play try again.
- Different game modes: The game offers a few different game modes. In single player mode you have the campaign, which I already has mentioned offers 4 tutorial stages and 20 other missions. Then you have the Skirmish option. In Skirmish you can select a battle that you need to complete. Most of the time you just need to kill all the enemies and conquer all the villages that there are on the map. You also have the multiplayer option, but I will talk about that a bit later in this review.
Somewhere between
- Combat focused: Praetorians is heavily combat focused. You don’t need to manage resources or something. You simply train your troops and rally them towards the enemy. The only thing that you need to keep in mind is that you have enough villager space to recruit them but this will simply recharge over time. Also, in order to build structures like catapults you don’t need to collect anything. You just need the right troops. Personally, I really like the micromanagement. You want to build a tower, then go chop some trees. So looking at this aspect, Praetorians wasn’t really my thing. But when only considering the combat, it’s really great.
- Multiplayer: Another game mode that I didn’t talk about a lot yet, is the multiplayer option. It’s basically just like skirmish but here, you can invite friends. Well, I wish it was this easy. It’s good and fun that you can play together with you Steam friends. But almost nobody own the game, and if you are looking for online games, well there are none… So it’s good that the option is there, it’s sad that you can’t use it due to a lack of players.
What we disliked
- HD remaster: Probably the most important part of the game since this is the HD remaster. We got to judge this, and well, let’s make one point very clear: it totally sucks! When you zoom in on the characters, their hands look like Lego hands or something. When I see a game getting an HD remastered version, I expect a lot more than this. It’s a good game but they better made it a rerelease or something. Just no…