Playability: 2.5. We start on a large island in the Nile River Delta. We are surrounded by water which means we are safer than usual from attack. The instructions inform us that our loyal ally the Babylonians will help us. After half an hour or so the Babylonians opened fire on one of my triremes sailing peacefully by their shore. As Bugs Bunny has famously said, "Of course you know, this means War". I switched my diplomacy from ally to enemy with Babs. Earlier I had bought shared sight with them to increase my map but I didn't get any new map. This should have been a clue they were actually not my allies. Gradually I took over each other island and built a TC there to start scooping up resources. But I didn't really need to, the designer has put so much gold and stone on each map you never really need to leave home. This makes the scen run pretty long as you take over the last island and the CP draws from its never ending supply of gold to make high end units to throw at you.
Balance: 1.5. In spite of being back stabbed by P3, nobody landed any transports on my home island and it was just a matter of grinding them down slowly one by one.
Creativity: 2. Nicely put together map and interesting combination of allies, if it had actually worked.
Map: 2.5. Nice island in river delta, way too much gold and stone, you could never run out. Enemy islands close enough so you can fire a catapult stone or convert a unit across the water.
History etc.: 1.5. Some relevant story line but telling the player the Babs are allies when they are enemies is a pretty fatal flaw. I checked later in the Editor and the designer has put Player 3 enemy with Player 1 and Allied Victory with Player 3, himself. After you finally destroy everything on the map, the final comment tells you, helpfully, "your friends the Babylonians have departed." Yeah, right.
Comments: This leads us to ponder on the project development life cycle, which begins with conception and planning, goes to Design and Testing, then to Development and finally Production. What if Mercedes Benz skipped the intermediate stages, and just designed a new car and then started selling it without even driving it around the track once? Unthinkable! What if Airbus designed a new plane and then started selling it without even taking it into the air? Unthinkable! And yet we see numerous examples of just this practice here in the scenarios, where a designer will design a scen and then skip the testing phase and ship it to the customer as a finished product. We are reluctantly led to the inevitable conclusion that the designer of this scenario never even played his own scen one time to test it, before foisting it upon us, the players, as a finished product. And that, dear reader, is why we the Reviewers get the big bucks, to discover this stuff so you don't have to. Just wishing about the big bucks...
EDITED: to correct the incorrect spelling in my long winded rant about incorrect scens. D'OH !