Jurassic War
Jurassic War is an RTS set in prehistoric times that includes RPG elements. It is reminiscent of Warcraft, both in graphics and the units’ movement and control. At the beginning of the game you have to choose among several tribes. Each of them has got “simple men” (not just workers like in other games as they can evolve here), and then each tribe slightly differs with regard to most advanced kinds of units, such as “magicians” and the like.
The RPG addition comes with experience: every time an unit of yours has killed something (be it an animal hunted for the only resource of the game, that is food, or be it an opponent unit) it earns this kind of experience you can see in the form of bars in the upper-right corner of the screen (when the unit is selected). Each unit has got these six bars showing its velocity, its light radius, its magic power, and so on. You can also choose to boost some of these bars only, that is they will fill up faster but at the cost of no progress for the other ones.
Then the six bars are summed up in one only bar located at the top of each unit, and whose colour represents that unit overall strength. White is the highest level/colour units can reach. The most frequent white-barred animals you will encounter in the game are Tyrannousaurus-like dinosaurs. You need a lot of training with high-level monsters to have your units become that strong. Obviously also animals earn experience, and this happen only when you die fighting them, because they don’t attack themselves.
The goal of the game is the same of almost every other RTS – killing the opponent units and getting rid of their presence on the map.
System Requirements: Pentium 90 MHz, 16 MB RAM, DOS
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This game is a real GEM! I was looking for it very hard as I had this as a kid and the RPG elements and the whole feeling to the game is like no other! So rare to have prehistoric RTS games and the RPG stuff is awsome.
Not only the creatures can level up, but even their apperance changes if they do. This is how an ordinary human becomes a “muscle man” if you boost its HP and usually warrior if you boost its OP and DP in the right amounts.
Also there are tools: axe, bow, special weapons which you can equip to your fighters and loot from the enemy or find at hidden places (sometimes even animals if they ate it). I think it is quite cool of an idea to not create “bowman” units like in standard games, but just have your random hunter and give it the bow if you want or a spear and a shield.
Also it is quite cool that the meat stored in your storehouse gets lost when your opponent destroys your building. Actually it is not lost, but will stay at the place of the building so your opponent can loot it. These things are quite funny in multi (at least it was for us).
The magic system seems to be weak though, graphics are not on-par with age of empires, but more like warcraft and the interface is not the most clear in the game industry. Still I think it is a good game – to me it is even awsome and rare.
Oh, did I mention dinos and awsome prehistoric-feeling metal music for the encounters? ?
Btw… for the music to work I had to use some tricks… I will try to look it up in my scripts as it give a real boost to the feeling of the game in my opinion…