The Demo for Empire Total War came out today. For the uninitiated, the Total War series of games is a cross between Risk’s turn style-conquer the world gameplay, Civilizations diplomacy, and the unit battles of something like Age of Empires. The previous games in the series: Shogun Total War, Medieval Total War, Rome Total War, and Medieval Total War 2 have each improved the scope of the world, added better graphics, more complex interactions between cultures, and taken the game into different time periods.
The newest entry, Empire Total War, finally delves into Napoleonic era warfare. For anyone who has seen the Sharpe series starring Sean Bean (or read the books by Bernard Cromwell) combat of the age was quite a bit more elegant than simply lines of infantry mauling each other with musketfire. This was the grand age of artillery, cavalry, and most of all, naval warfare, which is itself a new addition to the series.
Sadly the demo, released yesterday on Steam, lacked the overall world map, and as such, none of the interaction between countries, so I can’t speak for the diplomacy, trade, and general global politicking, but it featured a naval battle and a land battle to test out.
The naval battle was gorgeous. There’s something undeniably magestic about a 100+ gun first rate ship of line launching a broadside against an equally large and well armed enemy vessel. A quick google search for screenshots will reveal just how great they’ve got the ships looking. As far gameplay, it’s a tad slow and more than a little chaotic. Ships don’t turn all that quickly and so it makes for a roundabout affair sometimes, but it’s a joy to watch and there are more than a few tactical decisions to make: which ships engage which enemies, what cannon shot to use, whether to grappe enemies or not, whether to even engage or not.
The land battles are even more impressive. The featured map is the Battle of Brandywine in the American Revolution. You play as the english as they flank the americans and rout their forces en route to Philadelphia.
WIth control over a few units of hussars, a unit of dragoons, a half a dozen units of line infantry, some light skirmishers, and a number of cannon, you get a pretty good taste of what an english army could throw at an enemy in the 1700s.
Overall, I’m impressed. Games like this that provide a fairly solid historical foundation, but let the player go from there, tend to provide more than a little creative inspiration. And besides, sometimes it’s just fun to line a dozen cannon, a few thousand computerized soldiers, a couple units of cavalry and then let them just run at each other.
The game should be released in about a week so, keep an eye out!
