After weighing up each hero's strengths and weaknesses (Icarus, for example, can fly over pretty much any terrain, but his wax-and-feather outfit is exceptionally vulnerable to fire) and after picking two, it's time to bulk out your war party. There are four groups of warriors: archers, guards, flankers and chargers. Archers, naturally, provide long-range firepower, guards look after the vulnerable archers, flankers try to circle around and take out the opposition's archers, while chargers just pile in and dish out damage on anything that gets in the way. That's the plan, anyway. In reality, it's more likely that your intrepid band will just muddle around in their pixelly, badly animated way, ripping guttural growls of frustration from your throat until you decide to go for a pint instead.

Fair enough, all the basic strategy game elements are here. You can split your group into little selectable sub-groups. The terrain affects defensive and offensive capabilities. You can customise your party by buying any units you've met in combat so far, including centaurs, amazons, harpies and so on. There's even an RPG flavour, with NPCs you can talk to, items to pick up and characters that level up. Each hero even has a special ability, but the simple fact is that there's nothing to get excited about here.

Invictus has relatively few flaws, but they run deep: inadequate graphics combine with ill thought-out game mechanics (as soon as you clean out a raider village, for example, you're only given 20 seconds to frantically search for goodies) to cripple what could have been a serious threat to Age of Empires et al. Shame.