Rise of Legends
"Finally, a Steampunk RTS picturing the classic Magic vs Steampunk battle combined with invetions and everything that I love about the Steampunk/Clockpunk genres combined into a single, delicious RTS game? OMFG WIN!"
Reality
"Oh. You overstretched yourself so nobody without a space age computer can run this game on the graphics settings required to make it look good (Its an old game and still chugs sometimes on my current computer which is pretty fucking good) thanks to the engine being balls. There are only three races, only one of them plays interestingly, you never bothered to patch it and for some reason you managed to combine aliens with an utterly racist depiction of the Aztecs. Invention was sidelined, the economics were dull to the extreme, strategy was non-existent. That's fine, you will release a new version of Rise of Nations at some point, right?
Right?
Oh, you quit BHG to go and work on Farmville for Zynga. FUCK. YOU."
Yeah, those were internal monologues. I have never been more let down by a game then by Rise of Legends. It could have been awesome. Hell, it is the spiritual successor to a game I still play (Rise of Nations). I wanted to love it, I really did.
But in the end it was just an utterly generic, totally bland RTS that chugged to hell, was imbalanced as fuck and had the single worst campaign out of any RTS I have ever, and hopefully will ever, play.
Part of me is still hoping that someone grabs the Rise of Nations IP and produces a real game. It played like a real time version of Civ, it looked awesome (For its day), it made similar games look like balls (Looking at you entire Empire Earth series), the AI's were balanced and did not resort to (Overt) cheating (Looking at you entire Empire Earth series)... Man.
On that note (And since I have been ranting) there is on game that held an equal amount of ire for me.
A Game of Thrones: Genesis. To do what was done with that IP should be declared a criminal act. Every man and women involved in the development and production of that game should be taken out behind a shed and shot. At least Rise of Legends was fun if you fought only with the steampunk race against other steampunk races, AGOT Genesis was the single worst RTS that has ever been made. And I had so much hope for it, it being based on perhaps my favourite series of books (And the TV series aint that bad). But instead they made a pile of steaming shit, slapped a branding that would sucker in fans on it and sold it for 30 quid.
Bacon.