Strategy game on console is stunning

Think strategy games, and you’ll picture a PC gamer hunched over a keyboard and mouse, micromanaging the movements of thousands of units across the screen, building cities and laying waste to empires.

That’s a fun experience, but attempts to translate it to video-game consoles so far have been iffy at best. There’s just too much precision involved in the troop management to translate well to a controller, and the comparatively low resolution of most televisions doesn’t do justice to all those tiny soldiers.

Now Creative Assembly, the developers of one of last year’s hottest strategy games – the impressive “Rome: Total War,” a PC game that lets you control tens of thousands of soldiers on screen at once – are taking their version of strategy to consoles for a game being published by Sega in September, “Spartan Total Warrior.” And, surprisingly, it looks promising.

Strategy games, traditionally played on PCs, ask you to virtually re-create every step of a military campaign, from harvesting supplies to building structures to training and supplying troops that eventually are positioned and sent into battle. Some games are turn-based, so they ask you to pick what you want to have happen, then let you sit back to watch it play out. Others, called real-time strategy games, change dynamically on screen as you make decisions and commit your troops.

“Command & Conquer” and “Warcraft” are two popular strategy game series. “Rome: Total War” also sold well and was critically acclaimed for its detail and depth.

“Spartan Total Warrior” breaks new ground for console strategy gaming in the number of virtual people independently operating on screen — here in the 200-person range, compared to 10,000 in the PC game.

You actually can take control of one of your units and fight, which is something the Creative Assembly team who did “Rome” and “Spartan” said people constantly asked for. There are more than 125 attack moves, and you earn points in combat to customize your fighters.

The game runs smooth as silk, consistently maintaining 60 frames a second, which makes it seem especially fast-paced. You won’t be handling as much minutiae as you did in the PC game, but “Spartan” still looks and smells like strategy, just on a smaller scale.

The game has about 40 levels, and the team says to expect about 20 hours of game-play. There is an arena mode for instant combat.

Warriors become heroes, which become legends, which finally become the Spartan, the best possible fighter they can be. You can pick up weapons through quests and switch among them.

If you please the gods, they’ll bestow favors upon you, which gives this mostly strategy/action title a bit of a role-playing game feel.

There are human opponents, but there are also fantasy creatures to fight in this adventure, and there are up to four armies in every battle, which makes friendly fire (mostly from arrows) a real risk.

“Spartan” is smart about the way it brings strategy to the couch. It doesn’t try to replicate the “Rome” experience, with its wealth of units and overload of detail. You’re not going to find dozens of menus tracking endless breakdowns of statistics, and you’re not going to have the same frequency of pointing and telling your units where you want them to go.

But on the flip side, “Spartan’s” novel control-a-soldier approach means you’re right in the middle of the action, something that most strategy titles lack but console lovers expect.

That’s an intriguing hybrid of traditional cerebral strategy and console-style action, which makes “Spartan” a title worth watching regardless of its commercial success.

For those folks who prefer their strategy on the desktop, Creative Assembly is also putting out a new chapter in the “Rome” story: “Rome Total War: Barbarian Invasion,” which will add 10 new factions and is set immediately after the first game.

You can either play as Rome or as part of the barbarian horde, and there are 83 new types of units to play with. There are night battles, which look tremendous, and some new strategies because of the new types of fighters (some can cross rivers, for example, while others can’t).

Expect that add-on in August.