Empire: Total War Review

The biggest anachronism? At the moments when the cannons were going off and the thin red line was being turned into thick red paste, I found myself humming the 1812 Overture. The game's about the 1700s. Totally anachronistic. Unforgivable. Unforgivably brilliant, that is.

That happens a lot. The Total War games have always bridged the world of hardcore wargames and the PC mass-market. It was appropriate that Rome: Total War was used as part of the BBC's Time Commanders TV series - Total War is simultaneously dignified history and entry-level pop. As such, Empire has me excited about a period of military history I wouldn't normally give a damn about, reaching for the meagre reference points I have to process it: from Sharpe to War and Peace, whether it's in the right period or not (and it's usually not). Empire not only captures the glamour of shiny buttons and musket-shot - it convinces me that there is glamour in shiny buttons and musket-shot. It's quite the game.

It's also quite a lot of game, full of so many individual bits and pieces that a little top-level over-view will probably profit us. Empire is the fourth period (and fifth game) to be explored by Creative Assembly in a Total War format, after Japanese Shogunate wars, Medieval (twice) and Rome. The idea is a sort of streamlined credibility; while it tweaks a lot of the historical details for the purposes of a real-time strategy game, it's also a lot more like a wargame than almost anything in the mainstream.

So battles are fought between armies of up to twenty units, each one consisting of over a hundred men. You don't build on the field of battle, you just have an army which has to fight it out. As such, considerations like terrain and positioning come significantly into play. Morale also comes into it, with a strike which makes the opposition lose its nerve (a flank charge, for example) being enough to cause troops to turn tail and run.

My favourite historical error is that they've put Glasgow on the west coast of Scotland. It's for game balance reasons, apparently.

That's one half of it. The other half is where the units are generated: a Civilization-style turn-based wargame where you gather armies, research new stuff, play with taxes, engage in diplomacy, or set everything to "auto-govern" and click next turn a lot. Or, if you're more a strategic player, you press "auto-resolve" for the battles and get back to working out which Duke is best to be your Chancellor this year.

That's the engine which powers Total War. Tactics and strategy/economics are divided into two separate games, then conjoined. Successes and failures in each side of the game feed back into the other. The joy of the Total War games has always been how the two combine to create an authentic impression of statesmanship and generalship. Battles have much more real stakes than any traditional single-player game - it's the difference between having the game tell you that your capital will be destroyed if you lose the battle, and you, having built that capital from nothing, seeing the enormous enemy army sweeping in with only a scratch force to stop them. Total War shows, not tells, and reaps the dramatic rewards.

You can garrison troops inside some buildings now - if you want to make them easier target for cannon.

That's how Total War games have always worked, and the same's true for Empire - but more so. There's so much content here that it's phenomenally difficult to offer a comprehensive review. It's got the often-overlooked battle-map multiplayer, and campaign multiplayer is promised for a post-release patch. It's got design-your-own-skirmish play. It's got historical battles. It's got a hefty single-player linear campaign, more akin to a traditional single-player RTS campaign - with a few knobs on. This Road To Independence is arguably the best tutorial for how the game really works, starting with just battle-maps, then adding small single towns to govern, expanding to the conquest of the USA - and, finally, a Grand Campaign playing as the Americans.

The Grand Campaign is the centrepiece of Empire - when people say Total War, this is what they mean. Playing as any of the major nations, you set off to conquer the world. Well, that's one option - more likely you'll choose a short 50-year game to begin, with some more achievable goals which vary from nation to nation.

When I played as the British (as well as whistling a lot of patriotic jingles in seeming sincerity - I totally went native) my game centred on the sea-lanes, trying to maximise the amount of trade and keep them free of pirates, while alternating between industrialisation, dabbling in proto-Republicanist philosophy, and stomping around fighting the Cherokee in North America. The vast majority of my land battles for the first 25 years or so were against the Native Americans, which turned increasingly bloody when they got their hands on gunpowder.

Conversely, playing as the Prussians, with a scant two areas of control separated from each other in central Europe, led immediately to a classical European battle of muskets and battle-lines, and a rapid pursuit of ever-more-punishing gunfire drills. They were experiences so divorced from one another they may as well have been different games - different games that would take tens of hours each to complete. And in both campaigns, I didn't even get within sniffing distance of India.

Let me expand on that. Empire's Grand Campaign is the grandest of all the Total Wars'. Rather than a single world map, the game is divided into three military theatres: Europe, North and Central America, and the Indian Subcontinent. While the number of actual territories are reduced from the number that would be crammed into the same geographical area in another Total War game, that's a dizzying amount of space to consider. In practice, when you start to play, you don't worry about the world stage. You reduce it to something manageable. In England's case, my colonies. In Prussia's case, the land war. So when I said that I didn't even touch India, I mean that I didn't even send troops to a third of the map. It's an undiscovered country. God knows what it's like.

"Give us our tea! " "Shan't. "

Total War is scary big. On your first time through it you're going to have significantly different experiences from your friends, assuming you play different countries. Hell, even if you play the same one, you could follow completely different tactical routes. It's an almost impossibly big game, so I'm left judging it on general principles. From what I played, they work enormously well - generally.

In terms of new stuff to worry about on the strategic scale, one of the most immediately striking is the concept of trade zones. These are smaller theatres where you're only able to engage with fleets - the idea being that they're not places you actually conquer, but places you exploit commercially, South America or the Philippines for example. You create merchant ships and try to occupy the port slots. If they're already taken up, you can kick out anyone who's there with warships and take their place, or move fleets along any of the trade routes to actually pirate enemy traffic, adding to your coffers at their expense.

So that's why they had those funny hats.

Elsewhere on the strategic side, there's the introduction of a genuine tech-tree for you to research (one of the "techs" being philosophy, which causes an outbreak of republicanism and you deciding between staying loyal or turning to the old liberty, equality, fraternity); agents spawning by themselves as a by-product of other activities rather than being made, including the lovely Gentleman who can either do some research or challenge other bounders to a duel; recruiting directly to armies rather than in cities; governments and opposing governments with different staff; a much improved diplomacy model with more abilities to make deals, and... oh, it's bloody endless.

But now that I've mentioned fleets, I'd better get on to the biggest back-of-the-box feature: the ability to actually control sea battles for the first time. Like most back-of-box features, it doesn't actually make as much difference as you'd expect or hope. While it's mostly well-implemented, striking a balance between realism and playability, it's just not as interesting as the land battles.

Part of that is the nature of sea battles - they're all about fluidity and the constant movement of large single objects. While positioning is obviously key in land battles, it's an easier thing to get a strategic grasp of than a sea battle involving a handful of ships. In a closely fought sea battle, when I lose, I'm often unsure why, or what I should have done. Conversely, on land my failings are obvious. Since I didn't feel I was learning, I found myself building larger fleets and trusting to the auto-resolve. It's good to have them, but it's more of a welcome piece that's been missing from the grand tapestry of Total War than a reinvention.

It's the changes in the land battles which prove the game's most iconic and compulsive. There's a general shift away from siege warfare - partially precipitated by many of the economic structures which were previously inside settlements being placed in the country, partially because defences are pretty hefty investments - which shows off the mass battles to their full effect. The difference is also one of technology. Not the engine - which is stunning - but the actual weapons of the period. While melee is important, the massed line of muskets is the key image, and the effects of developing new drill on the battlefield change the tone entirely. Honestly, it's just lovely.

"Boarding? Us? No, we're just inventing the catamaran. "

The standard Total War bugbear has also been addressed, with the AI hugely improved on both battlefield and strategic levels. Suicidal generals are a thing of the past, and they even have the capacity to surprise me a bit, especially with the mass strike. Considerably outnumbering me, the Cherokee piled directly for my general in a decapitation strike in the middle of a generally overwhelming assault - but the AI is just as capable of playing cagey.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment is that the game hasn't applied the rethink of the campaign map details to much of the real-time battles. Specifically, the siege maps remain a sore point. The path-finding simply isn't good enough to deal with manoeuvring around the castles in a timely fashion - really, I should be able to reliably man the cannons before the enemy closes within range to lob climbing ropes. It's actually worse when the ropes have struck home. Defenders have a horrible habit of leaving the castle via ropes when ordered to move places. Concentrating on a battle to find that one of your troops has decided to climb outside the castle and come back in, opening the gate and allowing cavalry to charge in... well, it's a low point. Loading pauses are painfully long, too.

Empire will give you a new bad habit: naval gazing.

Empire is a massive game with massive edges. They remain scrappy. It's these sort of things which keep it from a 10; that limit it to being merely one of the games of the year, one which I'm going to play another round of immediately.