While it hits upon a few iconic fantastical images, it finds its own place and even a theme. It's a fantasy game, but not the 'Stick Some Elf-Ears On That And It's Done' type. Now we have some playable early code to compare and contrast those expectations with. At least that's what we hoped when it was announced. Rise of Legends looked to be taking many of the key ideas of the original game and applying them to a very different milieu, creating a game that, while it had the same timbre as the original, promised to be impressively different. But to their credit, Big Huge Games said screw that for a game of real-time soldiers and did something a little different. The predictable thing would have been to glue a '2' to the end of the original game's title and return to the scene of a previous real-time strategy triumph - to reaffirm brand qualities, or whatever marketing speak's popular in corporate boardrooms this week. Rise of Legends isn't the safe option for Big Huge Games.