Genre: strategy
Publisher: Sega
Creator: The Creative Assembly, London
Specifications:
Platform: PC
I have to admit, so far this is my favorite video game ever! First of all I love history, and of course love to believe myself to be a god. :)
The game series, Total War a very original strategy and tactical game, which let you command a full army of a country, even control an empire! Start around 16 years before the first crusade, in 1080. You can play along 4 centuries as a godlike commander of a chosen people, of course in a medieval environment. It is too long to tell all the factions, but everybody can choose almost literally any kind of people. Usually I choose the Byzantine Empire, which is funny enough, because who knows the history a bit, it is clear this empire is one of the many, which are more declined at these times and finally disappeared in 1453. But it wasn't really an empire before too, hardly survived the 13th century. And after the osman-turkish emergence it was dead meat.
So it was a funny thing made a rise of a declining empire. I controlled huge armies of the greek, and smashed the turkish and the arabs. Made fear my name in the west, and claimed back the ancient Roman territories like Gaul or Italy. Mighty armies routed the german and french armies, befriended the hungarians through marriage and made a polish alliance with securing them against the russian. The Pope tried to rally my enemies without any results. The mighty Byzantine empire ruled the world in the year of 1471!
Nice vision isn't it? You can make it real with this game.
It needs a power plant, but nowadays it is no problem to meet the minimum, even the optimal configuration. It is released in 2007 and the times made it more effective. The Kingdoms expansion fixed all the problems in the vanilla game and it has plenty of modifications around the Net. The game basicly has two parts: the campaign map and the battlemap.
The campaign is a turn based strategy Europe map, with a real surface, and rivers and seas as well. It is chopped into small regions (usually they are historical, but many gamer criticized its ahistorical regions like Berlin region, which is not even existed at that time) and each region has a settlement - city or castle - and a port, if it is possible. You control some of them and of course the rival factions control some. They mostly accurate: Constantinople is always in southeast corner of the Balkans, London is in the British Isle and English etc. You can move agents (priests, diplomats and of course spies and assasins as well) on this map. Your armies can travel trough land and sea, and can travel only where a real army can move. Mostly along the main roads. You have princesses to marry to a rival factions, but be careful different religions could cause problems.The another map is a real-time tactical map, with a battlefield, where your squadrons can use the terrain to your advantage, but they can turn against you as well! The battles can be zoomed while they are chopping the others to pieces and you can see each type of weapon appear: swords, lances, spears, arrows and even cannons at the end of the game. All the time you have to control your army, call them back if you need to, hold an area, or flank the enemy. Even the weather changes, so it is not nice, when your archers have to fight in lashing rain. Even the time is important, because in the night can be very dangerous to your troops morale, if you don't know how to fight nightime.
There is a multiplayer part as well, but only for the battles, the campaign only meant to play in single player. Of course the mods offer you to play in multi as well.
It has lot of criticism for its inaccuracies and the lack of the wider map and the factions. When the creator allowed the gamers modding the game it was so deep some of the gamers changed even the style and created fantasy or alternate history campaigns too. Most of them went to the historical accuracy though.
One of its big positive aspects its overwhelming management and real time combination. The turn based strategy and the real time battles give a perfect balance, and never can be bored of the management of your armies. The other big positive aspect, that you don't have to learn anything of the history of the game, you only have to know a little bit of medieval history and play on. You literally can play any nation in it (of course you need couple of mods for that) for example you can be Irish, or Catalunian but you can be a viking or you can control Salahdin's armies. Fun!
It is a negative aspect: sometimes the AI leads the same tactics all the time. Boring using the once found best tactics, because the opponent reacts the same all the time. The poor AI leads the other factions behave sometimes very stupid, not lively. As the mighty byzantines attacked the weak spanish, and they lost battles after battles. They didn't break though, attacked relentlessly all the time. The difficulties are a joke, because the Easy game is not enjoyable because of the AIs stupidity, the very hard level cheating like hell. So I would suggest a medium or hard difficulty.
At last, it has many aspects of governing. If you prefer hack and slash games or the mindless killer games you won't like it. You need to control too many things altogether and if you fuck up something you can pay a very dear price for it.
Otherwise you will have a serious addiction to be the ruler of the world. In the medieval times of course.
If you interesed in it you can find more details in the following websites: www.totalwar.com
www.twcenter.net
I can suggest two mods: try Stainless Steel 6.2 or Deus lo Voult 3.x
Rating: 95%(mine)/ 89%(general)
Why you check it out?
The stunning graphics of the environment, and the campaign map is enough alone, but really amazing to see in close detail the large amount of people fighting each other. It is like a real battlefield! No wonder the University of Cambridge using its engine for simulating historical battles. If you like civilization or sim city you will love this piece too.
You can learn from the game: that to rule a country and a people is not an easy task, even with this simplified version of it. You have to focus on so many things, you automaticly start to respect the past's great kings and queens...
Verdict: This game won the title of the Game of The Year in 2007. It deserves it. You can easily become addictive, if you like medieval history a bit. It has couple of weaknesses like the AI or the inaccuracies, but since you can modify it, almost every negativity can be removed.
