Cheap Praetorians (Software) (Windows Me, Windows 98, Windows 95, Windows XP) Price

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Customer Reviews of Praetorians

Great strategy game!
I had experience of RTS games (Total Annihilation, Age of Empires and Empire Earth) and after I bought Praetorians and played the first time, I found it very very interesting.
It's not the typical RTS game where you have to produce a lot of units and simply attack the enemy (like for example TA kingdoms or others) but you have to think in a strategic way before moving and attacking the enemy. In this game, mission by mission, you learn how to balance your troops and how to move in the territory. It's important the fact that troops can interact with territory (hills, woods). You can hide your troops, you can stay higher than the enemy and then attack you enemy suddenly (for example,if your bowmen are in a higher position they will hurt more seriously the enemy). In some missions you have to lay siege to a fortess with war machines.
To sum up, I think it's a good game, if you want to enjoy yourself and live the experience of "De Bello Gallico"!

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Praetorians is a pretty much must!
Although this game is great, I would give it a 4.5 stars if I could. First the good: Beautiful graphics (the scenery is almost like real), the campaign has a story (unlike some RTS games that have no campaign or story), skirmish mode is fun but sometimes too quick, great gameplay, and it runs nicely. The bad: The units are sometimes kind of dumb (they stand and do nothing sometimes when they are told to go somewhere), the unit graphics could have been a little more sharp, and there aren't many units (this is not really that bad but I would have liked more units; there are 9 different combat units for the Romans). Don't let the bad things sway you from buying the game. Unless you are a real critic than the bad things would make you very mad.

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Pray to Reruns
Once again I have been duped into buying a game based upon the advice of so-called consumer reviews only to discover that the game fails to live up to the hyperbole. Lets be brutally honest, Praetorians is a game which is marketed to appeal to the Medieval Total war fans but delivers a product more akin to Age of Empires. If you are about seven years old and/or have a basically juvenile sense of wonder then surely this game was tailor made for you. With the exception of the even more awful Platoon PC game this has to rate as my biggest gaming disappointment to date. The pundits for this mediocre yawner glory over the fact that the game has no resource management thus freeing you up to do lots of scrapping. This is basically true but on the down side the maps are so badly designed that manouvering units in anything other than a gaggle is practically impossible. Units will often blunder into one another and become entangled, this is not conducive to a happy gaming experience and the battle has not even been joined yet. But this is pretty much the essence of the game. It (bottlenecked maps)force you into waging war between individual units rather than the grand battles of the ancient kingdoms which were set piece affairs on open ground. Units are created in villages/towns which sounds fine but once again we are dealing with an abstract depiction - a few huts and structures surrounded by a simplified pallisade and peopled by a few sprites which bustle about to simulate an occupation of sorts. Oh did I mention that this village/town is just slightly larger than a unit of infantry? Must have slipped every reviewer's mind I guess.Even creating units is a puzzlement. Just create a barracks and then instruct your leaders to train this or that and voila there they are-a couple of minutes later. Although some units require that your leader sacrifice honour points to create-Oh did I forget to mention that, must have slipped my mind....Honour is won in the slaying of enemies. In short there is an artificiality pervading the game which rather than enhancing gameplay reduces it to a farce. The Ai prefers to operate with a mob mentality - so much easier than trying to reproduce the model of efficiency and co-ordination which was the Roman Legionary system. Unlike the Total War series which relies upon maps with realistic terrain, Praetorians has opted for an even more simplified version of Age of Empires (the original one at that). Even the camera view is severely limiting because you can only see in line of sight which is not very far in this abstract representation of the real world. The map is revealed - not blacked out- thank heaven for small mercies. Pulling the camera back to take in anything more than a top down view of a small area is impossible-pretty much like playing the game. This even extends to the lack of ability to angle the camera - something I haven't seen in a game like this since I don't know when. PC gamers deserve so much more than a retro update on a much worn out formula given the relative expense of a new purchase - $40 or more for most, including this one. In mere value for the dollar I would be hard pressed to say that at half the price I paid for it ($20) that it is a worthwhile purchase. I could go on but just move along folks - nothing to see here....