The Creative Assembly are famous in PC circles for their fantastic Total War series of hybrid real-time/ turn-based strategy games. Spartan: Total Warrior (Spartan from now on) is the companies first Total Warrior branded title and their first attempt at a game for the home console market.

The Total Warrior franchise is very different from its older PC relative and it is important for fans of Total War to realise that this game is a very different beast aimed squarely at a very different market. Spartan is a pure single-player button smasher set in an alternate mythology fused ancient Europe. This is a world where Medusa is used as a weapon of mass petrification, skeletal Trojans reanimate for round two of the battle of Troy and when Romans are not using flame throwers they are coming back from the dead as legions of zombies. Not exactly historically accurate, but fantasy is always more fun than reality to some people.

Spartan also differs from the Total War series by focusing on only one combatant and giving the player no control whatsoever over any of his allies and fellow Spartans. The scale is also tuned down a bit but when you are always right in amongst the action I doubt you will really notice or care for that matter as you carve up Romans like Mum's roast on a Sunday.

The story revolves around the Spartans under the command of King Leonidas making a stand against a ruthless Roman invasion of Greece. You are the Spartan, a raw recruit of Sparta thrust into the conflict prematurely when the Romans reach your home town's city walls. With the help of your best mates Castor and Pollux, you repel the invasion before breaking ranks and setting out on a quest commanded by the Gods to put an end to the Roman madness destined to bring an end to the world.

Spartan at its core is a very simplistic game and hopes to encite simple pleasures in gamers with such things as the sight of more claret than a wine tasting binge through the Barossa. There are no multi-button chain combos to worry about memorising, just frontal or radial offensive and defensive strikes and impressive looking special power attacks. Rolling and jumping can be added to the mix but is not always necessary and furiously smashing the A and B Buttons with the occasional Trigger pull should get you though most situations. Spartan is one of those games that will give you sore fingers after playing for not too long, but you will keep your breaks short as the furious action is quite addictive.

The action sequences in Spartan are big. You will hardly ever find yourself with a numerical advantage or in anything even remotely like a fair fight'But that's what being a Spartan is all about. Killing and killing often, attracts the favour of the Gods and in particular Ares, the God of war. Having help from upstairs certainly has its advantages and not before too long, the Spartan has the ability to really impress with some rage fuelled blistering fast combos. The player has no control over these combos, except when to initiate them by pressing in of the Left Thumbstick (done accidentally more often than not in the heat of battle). By doing so, depending on what attack is used, the Spartan will either kill one particular character in a very nasty and gory fashion or zip around the battlefield like Superman having lopped off half a dozen heads before the first one has even hit the ground.

The real power of the God's favour manifests itself usually in lightning powered offensive and defensive attacks. Essentially the standard frontal or radial attacks are infused with the power of one hundred million volts, resulting in one hapless foe usually vaporising or a few dozen in the immediate vicinity having their head exploded! It's not all lightning and exploding heads however as the multitude of additional weapons you collect throughout the game all have their own take on what a Godlike mass killing should look like. Similarly, each weapon has its on strengths and weaknesses that generally encourage their use in certain situations or environments. The twin swords for instance sacrifice the added protection of the shield for an extra killing hand and much more ferocious attacks while the War Hammer swings about as fast as you would expect to be able to swing a tree trunk but the damage it can impart is appropriately impressive.

The Spartan's ability to use super attacks is dictated by his power meter which fills through the collection of blue orbs left behind by slain enemies or by praying at blue shrines dotted throughout each level. Similarly, health can be replenished by the occasional green orb left behind or by praying at green shrines. These shrines have limited power however and will explode when depleted, so use them wisely.

The graphics in Spartan are a mixed bag. The graphical effects are quite nice especially the lightning and arterial sprays. Unfortunately the character models and level geometry are not up to the same standard. Now I can immediately understand that the Xbox is only capable of so much and when you have tens of soldiers fighting each other simultaneously, game designers have to make certain sacrifices. For games like the Dynasty Warriors and Kingdom Under Fire series, the most obvious sacrifice is in draw distance which manifests itself in the form of a persistent fog in the surrounding.

For the most part, the draw distance in Spartan is pretty good and clever level design serves to give an even greater sense of scale. Additionally, during combat the camera rarely gets close enough to the action to highlight the games modest character models but during the in-game engine cut-scenes it is all too obvious. The ugly, angular and low-resolution textured characters are thrust right into the face of the player severing the suspension of belief in the same blow. Spartan would have benefited greatly from the use of pre-rendered cut-scenes for the cinematics.

The level design itself, while sometimes cleverly giving the impression of scale, is actually pretty simplistic and linear. Linear levels are not always a bad thing as player always has a clear and distinguishable path and objective to follow but cast your eyes on the Greek and Roman architecture that surrounds the Spartan on his quest and it is a little on the simplistic side. Granted, this is most likely another one of the sacrifices for maintaining a rock solid frame rate during battles on a scale rarely seen on consoles.

The camera in Spartan is one of the better 3D camera systems you will find in a third-person perspective game. It does a good job of keeping the action on screen and the camera outside of level geometry. Unfortunately, the same can not be said about the targeting system. Targeting in Spartan is done automatically for the player with the Spartan usually attacking the enemy closest to his front. It works fine in melee combat (although rolling can be a bit random in regards to where you will end up), but for ranged combat, the controls are what I would consider broken.

Targeted enemies and objects (the game staple exploding barrels for instance) glow green when targeted but there is no way to cycle through target other than by manoeuvring the Spartan himself. That would be fine if you weren't limited to side stepping when your bow is equipped. Add to this the inability to target and or see enemies at elevations higher then the normal camera range and you will find yourself almost always frustrated when the need for arrows arrises.

But don't think Spartan is just another mindless action romp as it does involve an element of strategy. After each act, the player is awarded a number of tokens. These tokens can be used to upgrade the Spartan's Health, Damage or Power (Special attacks). Players distribute the tokens however they see fit based on the way they play the game. By the time you reach the final battle the Spartan should well and truly be maxed out in all areas and be quite a force to be reckoned with.

Additional depth can be found in the games many simple puzzles. These puzzles are usually tasks such as protecting sappers or innocents, finding and activating switches or setting explosive to destroy fortifications or opening passages for further advancement through levels. None of them would stump a trained chimpanzee, but they do break up the monotony of the hack and slash gameplay.

Besides the story mode, Spartan contains an Arena Challenge mode with is akin to score attack modes of many fighting games. The Spartan enters a selected arena for a series of consecutive battles against scores of increasingly difficult enemies. You do not regain health between waves so one bad performance will most likely doom you in the following wave. The aim of this mode is to last as long as possible and beat you previous highest score. Secrets found during the story mode unlock things that may help you in arena battles such as a squad of Spartan spearmen or archers or health and power shrines.

Music in Spartan may not be exactly what you were expecting. Instead of the Hanz Zimmer esk orchestral soundings of films such as Gladiator, Spartan's soundtrack has more in common to what you would hear at a hardcore dance party. There are orchestral sounds, but the majority of the games action takes place to thumbing techno beats. Sounds weird in theory but works a treat in practice. Voice acting is generally well done but a few of the accents seem a little out of place and more football hooligan than Roman general.