Empire Total War

Where else can you be A Bloody Madman, a Founding Father, an Expansionist Power, A New Rome, A Veteran Strategist, a Master of the Americas, and be Only Obeying Orders? Why, only when you are playing Empire Total War, of course. Those are some of Steam.com's Personal Achievements I've won playing Empire Total War on Steam's internet-based game access system. I've spent 106.5 hours over the last two weeks obtaining those achievements. I know this (even if I don't quite believe it), because that's another of the stats Steam collects when you play a game over their system. And that should tell you two things. I have a serious mental illness. And Empire Total War is, like The Creative Assembly's other Total War offerings, a highly addictive game. But sad to say, its an addictive game for which you can have a love-hate relationship. With Empire Total War, The Creative Assembly has had it first light brush with the ancient Greek curse of hubris. Icarus descending (though not with quite so steep a drop.) Sad to say, my experience of Empire Total War has been like going into a auto dealership to take delivery on a brand spanking new lamborghini and having the dealer drive it out to the lot to greet me, and then having a ball bearing fall out from under the engine and roll towards me to stop on my left toe. Following on from their great success with Rome Total War, CA's reach has finally exceeded its grasp. But what reach! What grasp! More games should semi-fail so magnificently

First, there's the opening cinematic when the game first starts. By now you've probably seen it just about every where and gotten sick of it. But on first sight I could tell that it certainly deserved the omnipresent exposure it got. It gave me that same thrill I got watching the opening cinematic for the original Dawn of War. So theatrical, it held out the hope that one day video games would come with their own feature-length movies. (What am I saying? The software for the Resident Evil video games has already been used to create a feature length movie consisting solely of the software-generated characters. The age of the synthesbians has already dawned.) This opening cinematic made rich promises for the lamborhini-hood of this game.

And then one of the ball bearings rolled by. If you've played a Total War series game before, then you know the game has two parts: a campaign map for strategic movements, and then battle maps that are loaded for fighting the tactical battles that result from the strategic moves. It took an irritatingly long time for the campaign map to load, and every battle map that loaded took an even longer time to load. I ended up taking quick breaks to do some household chores every time a battle map started to load. (My apartment has never been cleaner or more organized).

And then I saw the campaign map. As beautifully detailed as any Civilization IV map. As you zoom up and away from the sim-world you see little clouds go by like you're on a NASA spacecraft orbiting the earth. As you zoom down to enlarge the details, you see little chimney's with smoke billowing out of them. (Later, when you suffer raids on your cities by enemy factions, you'll see billows of black smoke coming up as they set fire to your factories and dwellings). And seas areas are remakably detailed. They remind me of the wonderful detail of Sid Meier's Pirates 2.

But there's a ball bearing that goes with this beautiful map. If you haven't stayed on the technology tread mill and gotten a new PC every other month, the movements that take place on the strategic map are a little slow. Fortunately, you can tap the space bar and speed things up a little. And sometimes there's a brief hesitation between when you click on something and the view shifting to center on the thing you clicked. I've heard that there is a patch coming up to fix this.

Then I saw my first battle map in one of the tutorials, and I was utterly blown away. The detail! The texture! The color! The realism! The animation! Smoke! Fire! The sounds of battle! Bulidings that fall apart when cannon fire keeps hitting them. Though the little soldiers are clones, they are realistically detailed enough that from a little camera distance (camera angles!) they look like a troop of real people. When they are standing in a line waiting for orders, I've seen them shift from side to side and scratch themselves. There are realistic animations of the soldiers of this period (the 1700's) going through the detailed motions of priming their muskets, raising them to aim, and then firing. The artillerists go through the motions of priming their cannons and finally firing it. (There's no drama quite like that of a row of cannoneers preparing to fire cannister rounds as enemy infantry advances towards them in a bayonet charge.) Remember when you were a kid playing "cowboys and indians" or "war," and you wanted your friends to fall down when you shot at them, just like you saw soldiers go down in the movies? Well, in Empire Total War you get that itch scratched very thoroughly. The troops have very convincing animations of getting hit and falling down dead as a door nail. Every streak of blood lust you have is fully satisfied here.

All this is wonderfully addictive stuff to watch, but its also beautiful beyond description. When you turn your camera angle and look at the grass at ground level, you'll see waving grass that has hints of purple in it just like you've seen in someplaces in real life. The battle maps for India are just the most dramatically beautiful things I've ever seen in a computer game. You begin to understand why this ground worth fighting over. And there are wonderful little period touches with the various buildings and other objects on the battlefields. This is where you realise Empire Total War is in the lamborghini category of computer games.

And that was just the land battles. The big innovation in Empire Total War is the tactical sea battles. Previous Total War games did not have the option to go to a tactical battle for sea units. Empire Total War does. And what a thing it is! I was absolutely amazed the first time I saw the sea battle in the tutorial. The lighting! The reflections on the water! The waves! The weather! And then there were the ships. Galleons. Indiamen. Sloops. Brigs. 1st through 6th rate ships of the line. They are magnificent and magnificently detailed. Fans of the fiction for this period (Patrick O'Brien, C.S Forester) will be in hog haven just for this part of the game alone.

And this last is where I think The Creative Assembly so magnificently over reached. I believe some of the loose ball-bearings this lamborghini has is due entirely to the fact that CA attempted to create one game and ended up working on two games at the same time. I'm thinking that the land part of ETW was already an ambitioius undertaking. Adding this wonderful sea part probably taxed their resources to the limit. There were initially a number of complaints about how hard it was to control the sea battles. If a sea battle had more than a few ships, things got very chaotic indeed. You couldn't enjoy the battles because of all the micro management that was needed to keep from getting slaughtered by the AI that was very good at micro-management. There has since been a patch which has alieviated much of the problem, and I now find the sea battles very enjoyable.

But there are still other little irritations that give you the impression the game has been rushed into release before being quite finished. The earlier Rome Total War had nice touches that demonstrated it was very much a finished game. In the campaign and battle tutorials, the in-game tutor-characters introduced themselves before launching into the tutorial.

In Empire Total War, those little touches have gone slightly awry. The campaign tutorial is combined with a story driven set of five episodes about the American Revolution called "the Road to Independence." But its not really identified as a tutorial. You start it thinking its a special campaign for the American faction, and then you find youself being given story line cut scenes of the ruminations of George Washington that segway aburptly into tactical battles, and later on are interspersed with mini-campaigns that are interlaced with tutorial advice that seems out of order in some way. The mini-campaigns themselves have features removed from them so that they are introduced episode by episode, but without these episodes being identified as a tutorial, they give the impression of something being wrong with the game. And given the long load times, this setup can experience some problems. The first time I clicked for the Road to Independence, I found the load time so long I thought the game had hung and started tapping some other keys. When the load finally completed, this caused the game to jump me from the first cut scene right into the first tactical battle without any explanation. This gave me a bad first impression.

The tactical battle tutorial is in two parts. One for a land battle and another for a sea battle. The land battle is listed first, so most people will click that first. But the problem is that the tactical battle tutorial character, a haughty British admiral, introduces himself in the sea battle tutorial. So when you start the land battle tutorial first, you get this haughty, distainful British twit talking at you without introducing himself.

Another problem I had while playing "the Road to Independence" was that while playing the tactical battles I sometimes encountered one particular tune of background music that was a littlle too zippy and unserious for the forground proceedings going on. It was my ill luck that caused this tune to be playing when I started some of my tactical battles in "the Road to Independence." This was another bad first impression.

These are little touches that have gone awry and given the game a lackluster over all first impression. But there is no reason to despair. I still enjoyed the game immensely (and immoderately!) And The Creative Assembly has been coming out with a series of patches that have been gradually improving the game. I submit that this game is so good that its developers and distributors know this game will be a long term source of revenue. So they have every motivation to continue to improve the game. For example, new Down Loadable Content (DLC) has recently been made available. And I believe we can expect to see more of that later.

Warts and all, Empire Total War is still definately a game to get.