XIII Century: Death or Glory (PC)

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.



Naturally, it's unjust to penalize XIII Century because it's not Total War, but it's hard to enjoy the game when scenarios don't scale up in difficulty through the campaigns. The custom battles are a poor training arena because the maps have none of the terrain variety of the historical scenarios. You could drop into "arcade mode," but that feels a little like cheating.



Beyond the extreme difficulty, which some people might enjoy, there are other reasons to skip this title altogether. Even though the battles play differently, they all look the same. Every side has generic pikemen and generic swordsmen, with minor variations in cavalry or support troops. Their colors don't stand out, so the only way to tell whose army is whose is through the icons that hang over their heads. If that unit is routed, you're left with a tiny sliver of blue or red surrounding a white flag. The faction list for custom battles reveals that most of the Western European armies are identical except for their leaders. The Moors and Mongols get some cool soldiers, but Castile's army is no different from that of Germany. If your pikes and swords start mixing it up with enemy infantry, it's nearly impossible to single out your men for new orders.



Not that they'll listen, anyway. For a game that emphasizes the importance of controlling troops and getting them in the right place, XIII Century makes that very hard to do. Your cavalry usually have a default setting of "offense;" forget to change that and you'll see your precious knights rush at the first forest of pikes that comes into range. Grouped units will sometimes change their facing when ordered to move, forcing you to drag out and rotate the formation you want. They rarely keep the formation they are in, changing from a shallow block to a long column almost on a whim, even in an open plain. The interface is sticky, too. Selections don't always take, and movement orders sometimes seem to get lost as troops shuffle about.



Ironically, this stuff wouldn't matter as much in a turn-based game. The level of difficulty rewards careful planning, something you won't have much time to do. With less pressure to get your beaten swordsmen out of the melee, the fact that they are represented by a slightly different colored icon wouldn't matter. All the numbers that describe your units' status would be more interesting and important if you didn't have to make a decision that very second. (Though you can pause to give orders, this breaks whatever flow you've built up.)



With a different structure and a little more personality, I could recommend this game to the curious. There are some great ideas here, but the package doesn't come together to create anything compelling. There is surely a place in the market for vivid, 3-D historical battles, but they have to be livelier than this to justify their existence. You can't skimp on color or sound like Unicorn Games has, even if the historical model is accurate and the material inherently interesting. XIII Century does little to seduce even military history wonks like me, people who are predisposed to love a man in uniform. Even knights on horseback and Mongol archers can't close the deal.

This review is based on a retail copy of the game purchased by the reviewer.