The Golden Horde[Mediafire]

Being able to guide the armies of Genghis Khan is the only real attraction in The Golden Horde. Developer World Forge's real-time re-creation of the crazy years immediately after Genghis Khan pillaged his last town is just about as mediocre as the developer's last effort: this past spring's Great War Nations: The Spartans. This is essentially a straight-up sequel built atop the same engine as its predecessor, with many of the same issues relating to tedious micromanagement and sluggish paint-by-numbers real-time strategy gameplay. Some aspects of the design have been streamlined, making for a more playable game, although all of the pillaging and burning here still generates more yawns than thrills.

With that said, the idea behind The Golden Horde is a great one. The basic design is strictly by the book, with everything laid out along the same lines as something like Age of Empires, but the subject matter is unique for RTS gaming. Battlegrounds are all little-examined ones from Eastern Europe and Western Asia fought over during the tumultuous 13th century immediately after the death of Genghis Khan left his many legions of smelly barbarians without a pillager-in-chief. Despite the name, however, the game deals with more than just the Mongol armies. Three factions are included here--the post-Genghis Mongols, the Russians of the Duchy of Ryazan, and the Teutonic Knights Crusaders. Each side plays the starring role in a solo campaign dealing with different perspectives on the Mongol invasion of the 1200s. So the Mongols attack Russia, the Russians defend against the Mongols, and the Teutonic Knights seek to round up support to drive the Mongols out of Hungary. Each campaign is completely independent and can be played at any time. This leaves you free to bounce among swarthy barbarians, swarthy Slavs, and swarthy Germans at will. There are just 14 missions in the game, along with the ability to play custom matches over LANs (there is no online support) with up to eight players, although the huge maps mean that you can get a good couple of dozen hours of playing time out of the game.

Minimum System Requirements
OS: Windows 2000/XP/Vista
Processor: Pentium 4 @ 2.4 GHz
Memory: 512 Mb
Hard Drive: 4 Gb free
Video Memory: 128 Mb
Video Card: nVidia GeForce 6600
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
DirectX: 9.0c
Keyboard
Mouse
DVD Rom Drive

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