Spartan: Total Warrior

You are the Spartan. You are the Total Warrior.

EU release: 7th October 2005
NA release: 25th October 2005
JP release: N/A
Developer: Creative Assembly
Publisher: Sega
NGC Magazine Score: 82%
Mods Used: Widescreen Code

With the success of The Creative Assembly’s Total War series on PC, the developers wanted to branch out to console games. Instead of attempting to adapt their real time strategy games, they decided on a more action orientated title where you control a single soldier instead of an entire army. They do keep to their strengths in one way, as the game features an impressive amount of people on screen at once, both your allies and opponents.

But while Total Warrior is a spin-off of Total War, it’s also nothing like it. Total War was a serious simulation of ancient battles, focused on realism – to the point that it was used as a basic for a BBC show called Time Commanders where contestants would try to win historic battles. Total Warrior, on the other hand, is a full on fantasy, with Ares (the God of War) speaking to your nameless character in the opening cutscene and followed by giant stone mechs and magic.

Chopping down vast amount of enemies is, thankfully, very satisfying in Total Warrior, with simple but intuitive controls. Your allies are mostly meaningless, but it just means more people for you to wade though, and the dead remaining on the battlefield for a long period really does make you feel like a one man killing machine. You’ll occasionally have to press some switches, which feels odd in that everything is delegated to you and your allies just stand next to it.

The game is very top heavy, as it pulls out everything in the first level. Subsequent levels never reach the same epicenes as the first, and a few powerful magic moves don’t alter the gameplay much as you move forward. It’s fun, but there’s little substance. While there were no more games with the Total Warrior brand, The Creative Assembly still made a new game, called Viking: Battle for Asgard, which swapped Greek mythology for Norse mythology.