Cultures
Published by THQ
Similar to Tribes
Rating (1 - 10) 8
Reviewer Graham Freeman
Review date July 2002

This game is so cute. I am playing it right now, and it's been installed for ages. If you are not into micro-management, look away now. You have complete control over a dozen or so Vikings - where they go, what they do for a living, even when they f- I mean procreate.

Like most RTS games, you get the usual progression through a series of scenarios in a campaign. All fine and well. But the execution of the game appears so laid back, you can spend half an hour real-time (not game time) just building a house. Each character has a name, can be married or single, and does a specific job that you set. Men work and fight, and Women cook and raise kids. There's some blurb in the manual about how non-PC this is, but that it's OK cause the Vikings were like that. Who cares - the game looks so good.

Your characters wander around the map doing their jobs. Woodcutters chop down trees and stockpile the wood. Hunters catch rabbits and the like for food and leather. Building Constructors use the wood, leather and other materials to erect buildings for the workers to be based in. A worker who does his job for long enough gains a "diploma" in that skill. You have a list of buildings you can put up, which is based on the skills and diplomas of your workers. If you have no workers with a huntsman diploma, you cannot build a tannery for the leather he generates, but as soon as he's good enough a huntsman to gain a diploma, you can build a tannery. The best illustration of this is how to brew beer:

Farmer > Miller > Baker > Brewer

Build a farm, allocate a Viking to be a farmer. Once he's a skilled farmer you can build a mill and allocate him to the mill. When he's a fully-fledged miller you can build a bakery, and so on. If you think it's a pain to have each brewer train up through the ranks (Farmer, Miller, Baker, Brewer) you are right. You can build a school which can teach your workers any skill that has already been learned by someone. Handy.

In Cultures, there is no currency. No-one lives for the dollar, but everyone needs food and sleep. Gold only exists so that you can promote your militia from grade I to grades II and III. Resources are used mainly to build other resources, and the end products are either eaten or used to increase the efficiency of the workforce. Wood can be made into wooden tools that make Vikings work faster. Leather can be turned into shoes, that allow workers to walk faster between their house and their place of work (and believe me, at the laid back speed of the game, anything that makes them work faster is a must). If a Viking isn't living in a house, his food intake is higher, and he'll sleep a lot more. Annoying when you're running out of food, you need the bakery built quickly, and all your Building Contractors are fast asleep on the ground.

In fact, making sure that everyone has food is the basis of getting ahead in Cultures. I've found that getting the bakery up and running each game should be your first priority. After that, you can take your time and sort out the requirements to pass each scenario. Usually, it's collect so much wood, leather, food, or have so many inhabitants in your township. That's an interesting one, as you can marry off Vikings, and they'll work better. You can tell a married female Viking to go off and have kids - you can even instruct her to have a boy or a girl. Really handy, but not terribly lifelike.

My only complaints about the game are that it stomps all over my desktop pallete upon exit, and that the colours are screwed on my laptop. Definitely an application problem there that I haven't found a patch for. It's also not a fast game. This has an appeal, but you have to be in the mood for it. Sometimes you just wanna frag your heart out. At the other end of the RTS spectrum, there's Cultures. This game in one word - Cultured.

Graham Freeman

 


The contents of this page are © 2012 		Home | Top of Page