XIII Century: Death or Glory (PC)

(Page 1 of 2)

Right off, XIII Century: Death or Glory has a big image problem. A quick look at screenshots will persuade those too lazy to read that the game is a Medieval: Total War clone. Creative Assembly isn't the only company allowed to do 3-D armies with pointy sticks, but just as The Sims has set the bar pretty high for virtual dollhouses, the Total War games have been too good and too successful for most gamers to forgive even passable competitors.

This is especially unfair to Unicorn Games, because the 3-D battles are the only thing that XIII Century has in common with the Total War series. Though most reviewers will call this a real-time strategy game, it isn't. (Neither is Medieval 2, but that's another article.) XIII Century is a war game. It gives you the battles and you fight them. No recruitment, no campaign, no grand strategy; just 30 tactical challenges that kings and counts faced in the 1200s. Yes, it moves in real time, and yes, it is in 3-D, but this is as conservative a war game design as anything that you'll find with hexagonal maps and NATO symbology.

The battles are divided into five "campaigns," each with five scenarios. You need to win one battle to unlock the next one and there are five more bonus scenarios to unlock once you've completed the campaigns. It's never a good idea to put five-sixths of your content behind a firewall that requires the player to defeat enemies in sequence. This isn't a story-based campaign situation, where jumping ahead in the plot would ruin whatever sense of suspense you are trying to build.

Because the battles aren't otherwise linked, your only clue as to what the battle is about is the droning narration that sets the scene. The narrator seems to be starting in the middle of the story most of the time, so unless you're well-versed on the rivalries surrounding the Holy Roman Empire, all you end up learning is that your guys hate some other guys and they've decided to thrash it out on a field in the middle of Europe. You'll quickly learn to hit the space bar so you won't have to sit through this introduction every time you play a battle.

And you will be playing these battles a lot. XIII Century never lets up on the challenge. This is refreshing at first -- compared to the Total War battles, which can generally be won if you are half awake, XIII Century forces you to consider your plan carefully before doing anything. Catapults with flaming ammunition aren't going to save your butt here. You need to make sure you get your troops into position, use the terrain to your advantage, and, if possible, create localized manpower advantages, because you will be outnumbered in almost every single battle.

Sometimes, the battles veer from challenging into hard. Very hard. Stupid hard. Controlling a general with years of battle experience and a lot of luck was perhaps a bit of a stretch for me, a nerd who reads books. Forcing a river crossing against three loads of veteran pikemen with novice infantry and a lot of horses doesn't sound like a great idea. Louis II did it, but he was canonized when he died, so maybe he had divine assistance. Jesus isn't going to help me win a videogame. And that's just the first battle in the French campaign. On those rare occasions where you have a huge superiority in one army, the enemy has a lot of ways to counter the advantage. There's nothing wrong with difficulty, of course, but remember that a lot of players are going to walk in thinking this is some sort of low-rent Total War clone. Those people will get destroyed.