Total Annihilation: Kingdoms Review

This is a review for the game Total Annihilation: Kingdoms.

I know it’s a very old game but its very unique!
It’s a strategic game which DOES NOT use gold/wood or similar resources, but instead it uses “mana”.
I know some of you would say “it’s the same, just a different name for the resource”,
while i agree a bit on that, it gives a whole different feel to the game-play since you don’t need to send 20 workers on wood or gold farming, you just put a magic stone on a magic platform and gain mana till the end of the game, unless of course that stone gets destroyed.

It’s a strategic game without the usual hero system, it has 1 boss guy who you start with who builds the whole civilization, if this one character dies, the game ends.
You can turn that off in the settings if you want, but that’s the normal play.

It seems to have an unit build limit of 200 max (after you set it to the highest option at least).

It’s the perfect game for fantasy fight lovers!
The base game has 4 Races to play as, which are:
Aramon, which mainly resemble humans, but they have griffons/giants too!
Veruna, some sort of fish-people who work best on water-based maps.
Zhon, actually not too sure about those, they seem to be sort of best-shamans.
Taros, the undead and dark creatures. Starts with zombies which are terrible slow! But they are cheap and have quite a bit of HP, which isn’t too bad in return.

Each race has special end-game creatures, one being the Dragon of their element, and the other being the race’s deity (which takes nearly half an hour to summon).

The expansion for the game, adds 1 new race, which is robots and mechanical things, and a few more maps.

Now for the Specifics!

Graphic: Since its a very old game, it obviously doesn’t have the newest graphics, its a bit edgy, but everything looks unique and good for a game like this.

Sound: Other than the music, you might want to turn off the sound on this game because that’s some real low quality stuff there! But the music is nice and fits.

Gameplay: The gamehas different click mechanics than the newer strategy games, left click literally does everything.
You get to the end-game units in less than a minute if you want to, which could make the game very short.
Every unit has different weaknesses and it feels like you wont get far if you only use one type of unit. Also the units get armor upgrades if they kill enough enemies! Maybe you end up with an Skeleton-Archer with an Gold helmet! (Which also increases it’s stats a little)
The game has 3 different game-modes:
1. Campaign
2. Online
3. Bots: On this game you can NOT set the difficulty, the enemies will always be the same strong. But even without settings like that, the game is fun and worth playing.

OH!!! Before i forget!
This game has a map editor!
An easy to use map editor that is, it has 100s of preset tiles to choose from, you could just build whatever you want, even place units in it. But be careful as bigger maps might take a while to load (even on an SSD).