Empire: Total War (Singleplayer) Review

Would it not be cool if you could rename cities in Total War? Like, if you could change the name "Istanbul" to something like "Yo Mommaville," so that the game would give you messages like, "Yo Mommaville is under siege by the following nation: France." Yeah. The developers should have put that in.

Empire: Total War is 2009's Total War game (for PC of course. Beautiful, powerful PC...). It's set in the 18th century and introduces naval battles to the series. So muskets and galleons and whatnot.

Like previous titles it's an RTS involving thousands of 3D troops whom you deploy via the turn-based, Risk-like campaign map (complete with diplomacy and provinces and blah; an addictive game with its end-of-turn button). The naval battles are real-time and beautiful, too; but don't play them. In fact, don't play this game. You can stop reading now.

Just kidding.

I have written a list of things about the game that ruin it. Here is that list:

Thing #1) To auto-resolve a battle usually means to have more casualties, with a greater percent chance of losing what otherwise would have been an easy, average (boring) battle. (The average battle lasts fifteen minutes)

Thing #2) The game crashes, a thing extra-annoying in Empire because the last saved game might be an hour or more before the crash.

Thing #3) Buildings in the Middle East, real-time battles are the same buildings from the American Revolutionary War real-time battles. This takes away from the immersion factor.

Thing #4) Artillery doesn't always fire in the direction it's aimed at. It looks lame.

Thing #5) Troops have trouble walking around buildings. They have a tendency to walk (or charge) into walls.

Thing #6) Many of the dramatic combat animations are too dramatic. It really feels...not good, seeing two soldiers doing their Star Wars Episode I duel animations while surrounded by hundreds of guys, most of whom themselves are awkwardly shuffling around the crowd, looking for an opponent whom they can do the animations with.

Thing #7) Cavalry aren't enthusiastic enough about attacking lines of fleeing troops. Instead of galloping up to them and totally killing everyone, they'll charge the enemy and then awkwardly run along side them at a distance of ten meters for half a minute before attacking again. Who do they think they are? Sharks?! Just kill 'em!! Your ancestors in the other Total Wars had no problem doing it!

Thing #8) A lot of the melee that kills people doesn't hit anything. You know how the punches in fake wrestling look a lot like slaps? Well in Empire many of the musket and saber swings look a lot like they're fighting the air, and that the person on the other side of the air dies (often overdramatically). (To the developer's credit: the game does feature some good stabbings).

Thing #9) Sometimes artillery crews, after they've been involved in a melee, will not resume firing their cannons.

Thing #11) There are floating bodies.

Thing #12) Sometimes a drummer will drum with no drumming sound.

Thing #13) Of the three types of agents you have on the campaign map (which are the Spy Assassin Saboteurs, the Bearded Scholars, and the Monks) two of them are wrong. First those proselytizers the monks: they can only convert people, and they're not very good at it, so thinking about where to send them feels less like fun and more like boring. And as for the Bearded Scholars: they shouldn't exist; Creative Assembly probably refused to scrap them because they spent too much money on the sword fight movies that sometimes occur when there's a scholar duel. Also, Creative Assembly should have included some role-playing game mechanics in which the agents level up and have skill trees that give you choices on how to improve them, like 2011's Total War game, which has no scholars.

I've stopped with the list. You can probably tell just from its length that the game was so annoying that, when my game didn't autosave between two long battles and crashed, I said: "#*$@ this @*!$." And deleted it. And now I here write the reminder summary: This game, don't play it. It's a potentially addictive one that, at the end of a month of play, will probably make you wish you never did, as it feels so anti-quality.

Instead, get an awesome PC and wait for the addictive Total War Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai expandalone. (And read reviews) The coming game also features shooting, and it has gatling guns and ninjas. Empire: Total War has crap.