Playing God is rather fun - chucking out a plague of locusts here and there, maybe whipping up a massive hurricane, or perhaps smiting a particularly odious individual with a well-aimed lightning bolt. It's the sort of job you take on for the pure enjoyment of the vocation, as the pay isn't up to much and the six day weeks with no holiday entitlement can be stressful.

With the latest incarnation in Microsoft's "Age of" series of real-time strategy games, you don't actually get to play God, but you can enlist his help. Or her, or indeed their help, as there are many different deities for each civilization in the game. Namely the Greeks (think Poseidon and Aphrodite), Egyptians (Bast, Goddess of Cats) and the Norse (Thor and friends).

This is the major innovation with Age of Mythology, as the core Age of Empires style gameplay remains pretty much unchanged. It's still an exercise in town building, resource collecting and unit production while you advance down the tech tree of the ages. On the resource side though, stone has been done away with and replaced by "favour", which is your strength with the Gods.

This can be used to summon mythological beasts like Cyclops or Hydra, and also to inflict diseases or natural disasters on your enemy; all that good old wrathful stuff. And it's fantastic fun to bring down a devastating meteor storm on your opponent's army, make no mistake!

The three races all achieve favour using different methods. The Greeks must send villagers to pray at a temple, whilst the Vikings collect it via bloodshed (every kill pleases their warlike Gods). And the races are very different in the way they work overall, in terms of units, buildings and gameplay structure. So we have three very diverse choices as opposed to the Age of Empires games which offered tons of cultures that were largely the same but for small tweaks.

Furthermore, each race changes depending on your choice of minor deities as you advance through the ages. Choosing to worship the Goddess of love, for example, will make your villagers happy (for obvious reasons!) and therefore more efficient in their daily chores. This gives the game (particularly the multiplayer mode) a rich strategic vein that really is light years ahead of the old Age of Empires.

There's a decent amount of multiplayer options with different end game objectives, while you can also play skirmish matches against the computer. The single player campaign is a lengthy 32 mission affair which will keep you busy for a long time.

It's also worth mentioning that this latest Age incarnation features fully 3D graphics, and very tasty they are too, particularly the backgrounds and spell/disaster effects. The only place where Age of Mythology is a little bit hit and myth (sorry) is in the interface, which is occasionally clunky, but not to any major degree.

This is another in a long line of excellent RTS games from Ensemble Studios, although it doesn't exactly stray far from the classic Age of Empires formula. The change of tack with the smaller number of playable cultures which are more diverse works really well though, and the mythological aspects are superb additions. An expansive single player campaign and a reasonable set of multiplayer options will keep you playing for... erm, ages.