Spartan: Total Warrior is a combat-heavy action game that puts your nameless Spartan, sometimes with a group of allies and sometimes completely alone, against hordes of Roman and barbarian enemies. It's not uncommon to complete a mission with hundreds of soldiers slain by your blade. Yet the game has more in common with EA's Lord of the Rings adaptations than with the more obvious comparison, Koei's Dynasty Warriors series. The story-based missions have you pulling switches, shooting arrows into strategically placed explosives, and guarding sensitive people and equipment.

The game looks like a hack-and-slash, and it is in many respects. The bulk of the gameplay involves charging your character into a group of perhaps two dozen Romans and laying them to waste before moving on to the next pack. However, the Spartan has a good variety of attacks and weapons, and the game's difficulty soon requires that you put some thought into the best way to defeat a particular type of enemy. There are even times when blocking and dodging are the best tactics. Combat still gets repetitive after a few hours, perhaps because even half a dozen enemy types are not enough when distributed among such a large number of total enemies to be killed. The game is at its best when it throws you into a combat situation that seems impossible to conquer, but is in fact just barely feasible if you vary your attacks and use the right weapon at the right time.

The major problems begin when the game asks you to do anything other than fight. The game is divided into missions with all sorts of objectives meant to add variety to the mass killings. Open this door, defend that gate, escort this person, etc. Effectively, there's only one way to complete most objectives, so the game has a trial-and-error feel as you restart the level over and over until you correctly guess the method that the designers want you to use. There is a checkpoint system, which is absolutely necessary for these missions, which can last well over half an hour each, but the checkpoints save not only your progress but also your health and magic levels. So, if you reach a checkpoint with just a sliver of health remaining, you'll have only that much health even if you die and have to restart that section. It's not hard to see how this system can lead to some frustrating situations, since health pickups and shrines tend to be in short supply. I had trouble a couple of times when I reached a boss (checkpoint) with little health and no magic, and then over the course of a dozen retries had to find a way to prevail. The resolution is often more luck than skill, and that leads to a feeling of frustration and dissatisfaction with the game that tends to carry over into the next mission.

There are also some serious control flaws. You have a bow, and arrows are found in good supply, but there is no aiming system at all. Arrows automatically target an enemy or object (such as an explosive barrel) in front of you, and you don't have any choice over what will be targeted, so it's just a crapshoot. This issue makes precision shooting impossible, and when mission objectives call for you to shoot out certain explosives to trigger events, the targeting system can be an annoyance even when there are no enemies nearby. Such problems are magnified by the game's sloppy camera, which follows lazily and therefore has to be micromanaged virtually non-stop. At least most of the environments are large and open, which makes manual camera work easier to handle.

Otherwise, Spartan features an impressive graphics engine that can and regularly does draw dozens upon dozens of characters on the screen at once. Large groups of these characters will share the same sets of animation, but the chaos of battle helps to stagger the moves so that soldiers, both allied and enemy, act like individuals (even though they all look the same). When the engine gets a chance to show a large, deep environment, it has an impressive draw distance and generally maintains a steady framerate. The lighting is occasionally quite striking as well. Character models aren't very detailed, and they are heavily reused for groups of combatants, but you'd expect such a sacrifice when the engine is pushing upwards of fifty characters locked in grisly battle.

The audio production is not as solid. Although the drum-heavy soundtrack seems fitting for Ancient Greek battlefields, the hokey voice acting sounds completely out of place. I've heard better dialogue and acting in Saturday morning cartoons. The main characters, nearly all of them Greek or Roman, are performed with accents pulled from all over Europe (mostly British), and you'll even hear one or two American accents in there. Such disdain for detail might be really stinging if the game's story could be taken seriously at all, but again, the script is so poor that I wonder if it's meant to be intentionally campy. Ares, the war-mongering Greek god who sponsors the Spartan's string of massacres, cheers you on during battle with random quips so goofy and enthusiastic, you'd think he was a half-drunken fraternity brother launching his fist in the air while watching pornography during Monday Night Football halftime over at a buddy's house. There's nothing wrong with mixing fantasy with ancient history (e.g. a giant stone-built mech advancing upon Sparta, or undead soldiers spilling out of the Trojan horse), but this game's story has little purpose except to throw the Spartan into the next battle, which just happens to take place in yet another famous Greek location.

Spartan: Total Warrior's core gameplay mechanics can be a lot of fun, and at times, the game does a good job at focusing on what it does best. At other times, it loads you down with sloppy extracurricular junk in a well-intentioned but poorly executed attempt to give the game more variety. You end up looking forward to the repetitive parts, because at least they work correctly and provide a fair challenge (not one caused by design faults). Spartan doesn't offer much new material over games like The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King and God of War, both of which are more balanced and have vastly superior production values. It's still worth getting if you're a big fan of such games; otherwise, I'd recommend a rental only.