Empire: Total War (PC)
3/17/2009 8:20 PM | 34 Comments | Page 1 of 4
User Ratings (2 total)
0% Buy | 50% Try | 50% Fry
My Rating
What's Hot: Spectacular, detailed and lovingly historical
What's Not: Bad AI; Terrible documentation
Empire: Total War, a.k.a. Total War at Sea
After 10 years of ranging far and wide through the ancient world, the Total War developers creep closer to the modern age of actual total war. The term "total war" refers to the type of conflict in which all of a nation's resources are mobilized against all of its enemy's resources, no holds barred. Ironically enough, this is certainly not how the Total War series works. In
Shogun,
Medieval and
Rome, armies meet on discrete battlefields, bang on each other, and then go home to the strategic map after a winner has been declared. It's how the games play, it's how wars were historically fought, and it's clearly not what people talk about when they say "total war".
But
Empire: Total War is different. It runs the length of the 18th century and the breadth of the Western Hemisphere, from American Indians to subcontinental ones, skimming Africa to the south and going deep into Scandinavia to the north. War goes to sea with new naval combat that affects trade routes. Now artillery plays a central role on the battlefield, smashing houses that armies might requisition. Now towns are razed, farms are looted, and universities are burned. This ambitious, gorgeous, amphibious game is as epic as you'd expect. And then some. War is on the cusp of new atrocities and it's as "total" as Total War has ever been.
It is also a terrible mess from start to finish that makes me wonder if developer Creative Assembly has contempt for its fan base and utter disregard for everyone else. But I'll get to that in a moment.
Tactics, meet strategy. Strategy, meet tactics.
Don't we look good? Who cares if we're dumb?
As with the previous games in the Total War series, there are two distinct types of gameplay here. The tactical battles look better than ever, and the new emphasis on artillery changes the way they're fought, letting the player with the biggest guns reach across some expansive maps. These juicy targets give cavalry a renewed sense of purpose (the artificial intelligence certainly appreciates the significance of artillery, based on how it makes a mad dash at anything resembling a cannon). The new naval combat is another example of developer Creative Assembly bringing battlefields to life. We've seen some nice-looking historical naval combat these days, most recently in
Pirates of the Burning Sea. But nothing rivals these thrilling naval engagements between ships populated with little men who fling themselves into the water as their vessels sink. There are shredded sails, toppled masts, explosions, splashes, waves and debris. Time was when people who loved these historical details had to imagine them while staring at hexes. But there's no historically-themed eye candy like the latest Total War eye candy, and
Empire doesn't disappoint.
All of this is situated on an entirely new strategic map, which abandons the old model of provinces in favor of something more fragmented. The map is still divided into provinces for the purposes of who controls land. But there is a new resource model built around towns springing up in their historical locations, each its own unique resource "node." As towns emerge, you dedicate them to various specialties. Do you want to make money, placate the population, or advance your technology? Choose wineries, plantations, churches or schools. The new strategic layer does a great job of bringing the map to life and giving it as much historical flavor as the far more complicated maps in Paradox's Europa Universalis series.
