Empire: Total War » ChannelFlip

games: Empire: Total War

March 9 2009 | Arnold Pistorius

Creative Assembly has been turning historical eras into strategy games for years.

From Feudal Japan to the Roman Empire, to the tin hats of Medieval warfare, they’ve created masterpiece after masterpiece by taking their basic gameplay template and applying it to a different style of warfare.

If you don’t know anything about the Total War series, here’s a breakdown of it’s gameplay.

It’s 55% an overview of the world giving you a chance to control and develop cities and move characters with special powers around the map. You can develop settlements, and even research new weapons and sciences. You can even spy and assassinate enemies.

The other 45% of the game has always been the breathtaking overview of individual battles. This is actually to use the technology you’ve researched on the big map.

In Empire: Total War there’s also an option to let the computer to play the battles without your help. But seriously, why would you?

These battles can be epic, and it’s very satisfying to shatter your enemies. Then zoom in really close, and laugh at all their dead bodies.

This time, we’re in the 18th century. The world map is familiar, but different. Compared to previous games everything is more visible on the map, with universities and farms visible outside of your capital city. There’s more emphasis on instant access, letting you see what’s going on without too much clicking.

This really helps to draw newcomers in without too much effort. Total War games will never be simple, but in Empire you can ignore a lot of the game, and let it manage itself.

You won’t get the best performances from your troops ‚ especially in the huge battles, but it lets you play the kind of game you want to play.

Prestige is a new victory condition, that lets you play the kind of game more diplomatically. It’s possible‚ highly unlikely, but possible‚ that you might just finish a game without even fighting a single battle. You can just be the first to research economics, invent Shakespeare and abolish slavery, and people will think you’re so amazing they’ll give up.

The other big addition to Empire is naval combat. In small battles, it’s like a teeny, tiny, game of boat chess. The difficult control of the ships, and the narrow windows of opportunity to blast your opponents make it a slow-burning thrill. But as the fleets grow, it becomes an overwhelmingly huge game of boat chess, where all the pieces move at once. And fire cannons at each other.

If you feel like your brain is punching its way out of your head so it can jump into a bucket of cold water, remember - you can pause the action to issue your orders. Thank God for that!

Do check out the minimum system requirements though, as the incredible amounts of action on the screen at once can really slow down an older computer. But if your brain is a bear trap, and you’ve got the rest of your life to spare, you should definitely get Empire: Total War, right now. Another stonking 5 stars!

The best of the rest:

Gamespy:
The key to understanding a Total War game is realizing that it’s not really one game, but two. There’s a traditional real-time strategy component in which players marshal their armies and proceed to maneuver, charge, shoot and stab one another until one side either retreats or surrenders. Then there’s the overarching “metagame,” a classic turn-based 4X empire builder in which players conquer provinces in an attempt to place their iron boot heel across the face of the world. What makes these games work is not only how well each side works as an individual unit (either might have been released on its own and been a quality product), but how well the two sides are married to one another. This, in a nutshell, is what makes Empire a brilliant game, easily the best of the Total War series to date.

Gamespot:
If you hadn’t heard, Empire: Total War is coming. This massive game will build on the foundations of the Total War series, which combines turn-based strategic elements (like managing your cities, oppressing peasants, establishing trade routes, oppressing peasants, researching new technologies, researching new peasant-opressing technologies, and diplomacy) and massive real-time battles. This time around, Empire will offer the huge land battles everyone has come to expect from the series (but with more emphasis on muskets and cannon), along with real-time naval battles that are genuinely affected by the realistic physics engine that developer Creative Assembly has built for the series.

Total Video Games:
Setting sail towards largely uncharted waters there’s no denying a new title from The Creative Assembly is one of a few PC titles worth getting excited about, content in the knowledge that it sits quite comfortably on the format and offers an experience unlikely to ever be replicated on the consoles.

comments

Pakman

July 26th, 2009 - 7:55pm

cool I have to try this game

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