"A lack of effort leads to a game that could have been the best total war yet but isn't."

Empire: Total War. It had a checkered release scale. The game originally slated for November 2008 was delayed twice and finally came out on march 3rd. Surely with 4 years of dev time plus an extra few months the game must be perfect or at least playable. Right?

ETW is the latest in the popular total war series of games by creative assembly. Created by ca uk the dev team that made Rome: Total war which was critically acclaimed surely their pedigree and experience would enable them to craft a wargame with unparalleled depth and complexity since they have had four games to learn and grow. Right?

ETW plays much like the previous games in the series. Your time is divided between the overall campaign map and real time 3d battles. You construct buildings and train troops and move them on the strategic turn based map which shows an overview of your entire empire. ETW's campaign map is the biggest in the series and encompasses the Americas, Europe and India.

The game has an entirely new way of building up provinces. Instead of a single central city for each province, there is a main city and smaller peripheral buildings like ports and farms that can be upgraded separately to one of several buildings. You can build buildings on plots outside of cities, so you get iron fields to make iron mines and fields to make farms and etc and when new villages emerge from getting enough population in the region you can pick what building to build there. You could build say buildings that raise loyalty like inns or theatres, or a new school to research more tech faster or one of a few different goods production structures.

Trading is completely redone and much more complex and better than in m2tw. The game shows the global price of different commodities so you can build those plantations or structures that let you produce that resource to generate maximum income from selling it. Then you need the trade ports to ship it. Negotiating trade rights with countries brings in even more wealth, although nations have limited trade ports depending on how many they have built and trade rights is often contested and means much more than it did in previous games. For colonial empires, or ones reliant on trade income enemy blockades can be very disruptive.

This system, while interesting comes at the expense of there being a LOT less cities and making it incredibly easy to get wiped out, as if you conquer the central city in a province the entire province becomes yours. Factions in ETW cease to exist if they lose all provinces in their original theatre, no matter what other provinces they may have. This means that if Spain loses Madrid. Naples and whatever else it has in Europe it is eliminated; even tho they have American colonies. France, which was the most powerful nation in the world at the time besides Britain for example, has one capital: Paris. If France loses Paris and whatever other places they took they are eliminated no matter what. This means on turn 2 as Britain you can land a force on French soil and take Paris eliminating them instantly. Brilliant.

Naval units are given a much more important role this time around because of the size of the campaign map and the need to form trade to generate any meaningful income as land trade creates little wealth.

ETW also for the first time in a total war game includes technology research. Constructing schools and the like will let you bring up a research tree. Here you can research many techs from better bayonets to better farming techniques to better cannons, new ammunition or better ships. There are also new tactics, like rank fire or platoon firing.

While this is a very good idea for Total War and add another layer of thinking onto the campaign, alot of the techs just seem to be useless.

There are techs that give you tiny near useless bonuses like -5% chance for weapons to misfire or +8% income from certain types of buildings. Alot of the techs seem to just be filler and since you have to research earlier techs to get later ones some of the techs are just massively better, like fire by rank, as it makes your line infantry a billion times more effective and you can't recruit some elite or technologically advanced troops till the very end of the tree so the game seems to insert filler techs to spend turns researching to slow you down. There could be more bang for buck with alot of the research items. The extra depth is certainly welcome though.

ETW for the first time in a total war game includes naval battles. Finally you can control massive ships of the line, agile sloops and everything in between as you blast apart enemy ships and use the wind to your advantage.

Unfortunately while naval battles look very good and sound good, they are annoying boring fiddly affairs. They require an incredible amount of micromanagement and there is just far too much to do in too little time with more than 1-2 ships it becomes a swirling storm of insanity that you can't possibly keep up with, as you spend time trying to line one ship up for a broadside, three others miss their chance and are blasted by your enemies.

Naval battles include three types of ammo: round shot which is your basic cannon balls for damaging an enemy's hull and sinking it, grapeshot also known as canister which is a shower of iron balls much like a large shotgun that is effective for shredding the enemy crew to whittle them down before boarding and chain shot, two balls chained together designed to rip sails.

The problem is that only roundshot is effective. Grapeshot takes far too long to be effective and doesn't kill enough. And the ship doesn't actually suffer any ill effects from less crew except it makes it easier to defeat when you board it. Too bad boarding doesn't work and your ship ends up just shadowing the enemy one and not boarding. Boarding is also idiotic as the enemy can still broadside and so can you, so boarding battles tend to result in almost instant routs and shorter battles than the time it took to actually board the ship

Chain shot is largely useless as it doesn't begin to drastically affect ships speed untill the sails are in tatters, which takes way, way too long when roudshot can sink a ship much faster. Sure if you board a ship and cause it to surrender you can claim that ship after the battle for your own, but it's not worth the bother or causalities caused in your ships.

Overall naval battles are a somewhat interesting diversion but they aren't really fun, more frustrating and are poorly balanced.

Special mention must be made of pirates in ETW. In ETW pirates have their own faction with some islands with settlements. They train ships and attack everyone and if you conquer their island they are permanently removed unless they rebel. The problem is that pirates get insanely powerful. You see pirate fleets with galleons and first rates and massive ships that they just shouldn't have and it can get so pirates are far more powerful than national navies unless you take them out early. This makes naval combat extremely frustrating and is incredibly annoying if they keep blocking your trade routes.

Land battles are completely different to previous games and not only because of the time period.
ETW is far more about manoeuvre, fields of fire, timing and judgement. It is far more tactical than M2TW, with alot less mindless melee charging and alot more careful manoeuvre. Battles are rather short and sharp with the deadly weapons troops have and picking the right time to engage is important

While the completely new way of waging war and different tactics make for a fresh interesting game alot of minor bugs and issues and cripplingly poor AI take alot of the shine off battles.
The first and biggest of these by far is the AI.

The AI in ETW is absolutely terrible. It is far worse than any of the previous games. The shift to mostly distance warfare has not been an easy one for the AI. It constantly crosses lines of musketeers, shooting its own troops in the back, never moving them. It sometimes makes massive columns of troops, all shooting each other constantly in an effort to fire at you, often routing its own troops.

They charge cavalry directly at your lines all by itself, way in front of its infantry into withering rifle fire, they often ignore their artillery and leave it unguarded, they leave riflemen exposed, constantly try to flank you the same time every time, make far too much militia, often run around in front of your lines getting shot, rather than just shooting back and generally act like complete and total idiots.

The AI is almost never fun to fight. It doesn't even remotely grasp the first idea of how to organise its army or how to best use it against you. It doesn't ever try new tactics and every faction tries to fight you the same way, even Indians with their poorly trained line infantry who are better at melee. It's even worse against natives or melee troops, as they will just constantly run around in front of your lines getting blasted instead of just charging you.

The AI is so bad it has to be seen to be believed and no amount of words can adequately explain how stupid and inept it is. The huge amount of pre release hype about superior AI tactics and totally rewritten AI was lies: the AI is garbage. It reeks of a steaming pile of elephant and dinosaur crap left festering in a sack in a stagnant pond in full sun in the Sahara desert during summer for a month. This point cannot be stressed enough.

There are tons of other things about the battles that annoy.

There is no way to tell units to “fire now!” You have to wait until everyone is in formation before they will shoot. If a unit is lined up and in front of an enemy and there's one or two soldiers still running to get to their places in formation the unit will not fire and cannot be made to fire. You are forced to wait till EVERY SINGLE GUY is where he should be and if the enemy shoot you while you waiting that's just too bad. Why was a fire button not implemented? This is horrible.

Units also cannot fire while moving, so missile cavalry cannot skirmish backwards and shoot like they could in m2tw. Units like Dragoons and horse archers are almost useless because in the ridiculous amount of time they take to line up and fire they will have been shot to bits, unless they are on a flank. It looks especially dumb to see horse archers SLOWLY line up to fire when staying still and moving in formation is the polar opposite to how horse archers worked in reality. This makes missile cavalry almost useless as you need to slowly line them up to shoot into a flank and unless you're playing the dumb as a brick AI you will be seen looooooooong before you can get into position and intercepted or shot with rifles. It's a mystery why CA couldn't take the time to actually have realistic missile cavalry.

There also isn't a better way to tell who in a unit hasn't reloaded than to zoom in and see who is reloading. Since muskets take a while to reload running up a unit to an enemy unit and expecting them to fire only to have them start reloading is deadly. Why wasn't a number like 70/120 included to show how many muskets were reloaded out of the entire unit?

Melee is also a total joke in ETW. The entire game is based around caned fighting animations. The way soldiers could be attacked by or attack anyone in melee doesn't exist anymore and every fight animation is a canned mocap one. This means that a mass melee is a number of individual soldiers fighting each other until one dies. Soldiers that have nobody to fight stand around doing absolutely nothing, so you get a few men in a unit fighting and everyone else watching, doing nothing until somebody dies and they shuffle forward for their turn in the scripted fighting.

This means that if you charge a unit into the back of another unit they will wait until the victims turn around and THEN kill/fight them, not just crash into their rear killing them, like in m2tw. Routing units will also turn around to face the pursuing units so they can get killed with an animation, rather than just being slashed by the chasing unit. This looks especially awful with cavalry. If the cavalry are moving the routing units slide to the cavalry from wherever they are so they line up for the animation which looks absolutely terrible.

The melee has to be seen to be believed. It just looks ridiculous to see a few soldiers in a unit fighting and everyone else waiting their turn and flank or rear attack never really working the way they should. You have to wonder how CA thought this was a good idea as it just doesn't work at all in a mass combat game. The entire melee system reeks of eye candy with no substance designed to look good and nothing else. That said some of the animations, especially the kill animations are very good to watch and battles as a whole look great in other ways.

Another big strike against the battles is that there are very, very few battlefields. The system where the campaign map features affect what the battle field look like doesn't exist in ETW. Instead there's a series of repetitive battles with only a few environments. Battles in settlements are the worst as you don't actually fight in the settlement but rather in what CA says is “a small village on the outskirts of the settlement.” What this translates to is about 3 small generic villages that make for thoroughly repetitive battles.

Siege warfare in cities doesn't exist in ETW.

Sieges at forts are also dumb. The AI is brain dead and if they make a breach in your fort they just run to the middle of the fort and usually stand there and die, ignoring your troops. They also feature infantry rappelling up the walls with grappling hooks, which just looks plain weird.

You can also garrison buildings in ETW letting your men shoot out the windows. This is a welcome new feature but it's hard to actually use it offensively and you're vulnerable to artillery. You can also be attacked in melee and become trapped in the building.

Another new addition is defensive fortifications in field battles. If you leave your army still for a turn you will see a small ring of stakes around them, signifying the unit has dug in. If you are attacked without moving you have the options to deploy trenches, walls that help stop bullets, anti cavalry spikes and forgasses, a sort of primitive land mine to give you the edge in the battle. These defences can make a huge difference and are a nice addition.

The environments are bright and colourful and have a very different feel to the earlier games. The bright uniforms, beautiful environments and tight formation style combat give ETW a feeling all of its own. It's just a shame the battles are beset by so many problems and terrible AI.

The diplomacy is also horrible. Diplomacy has been a sore point in all Total War games, but massive flaws really make it even more useless in ETW.

Top of the list is the recent patches additions make it virtually impossible to ask for or receive peace treaties. You can be totally crushing a nation have them down to one province outnumber then 100 to one have all their ports blockaded have them be at war with every other faction and they won't accept peace. You can take half an empires lands and then offer them back, plus every tech you own and they won't accept peace. It's just not possible: any war that's started will rage till the end of the campaign or until the faction is destroyed.

Declarations of war make no sense either. Maximum relations allies that you've been allied with for decades and who you have never done anything to will inexplicably declare war. Minor nations like Batavia will declare war on juggernauts like France and get crushed. There's no rhyme or reason to any of it. It's completely useless. It's easier to make protectorates, who of course will then attack you soon after. The feature in m2tw that tells you how close your offer was to being accepted is gone in ETW for no apparent reason so it's much more difficult to gauge what a nation wants. There is also no voice acting in diplomacy this time around.

What is good about diplomacy is that you no longer need to train a diplomat and walk him to the faction to talk. Instead you just click the wreath icon and you'll see a list of all factions in the game. and their relations to you. Click one, then click open negotiations and you can engage in diplomacy right away. This is much better than the very clumsy slow way of doing things in the precious games. The diplomacy interface shows allies, enemies, trade partners, and protectorates of everyone and there is also a map and if you hover over a faction you can see why they hate or like you such as if you are allied with an enemy, are not at war with an enemy of theirs, or from you expanding too much and taking too much territory, causing fear. You can click a faction then use the map to hover over other factions to see faction relations with each other as well.

ETW graphics are very good. The game on high settings looks awesome with vibrant colours detailed uniforms, varied faces lovely environments, with great lighting and great smoke and fire effects. The campaign map looks fresh, colourful and clear. No complaints with ETW's graphics.

The sound is a mixed bag.

The first and biggest change fans will notice is THE MUSIC SUCKS! Jeff van Dyck, the famed and awesome composer from the previous games had nothing to do with ETW and as a result the game has a small number of dull, generic and all together weak tunes to accompany it. Battle tunes have none of the feeling and complexity of the previous games and there is no way you'll play them in a media player while out of the game. At least the game still has different tunes for different locals but only one, the tension tune for an Islamic battle is any good, the rest are entirely forgettable. This is a huge, huge step backwards.

The sounds of muskets and cannon are very good and you can feel the weight and power of a volley or cannon shot, but there is a distinct lack of voices in battle. Most noticeably missing is the firing drills that regiments drilled to while in battle. It would act so much feeling to the game if you heard officers yelling “FIRST RANK, FIRE!”, “RELOAD”, “SECOND RANK FIRE!”, “VOLLLLLLLLLLLLLLEY FIREEEEEEE!”” STEADYYYYYYYYYYYYY” and the like. It's sorely missed and removes alot of feeling. There is also no talking in melee and melee sounds are mostly horrible. Musket vs. musket combat is way too “clacky” with lame melee sounds and death cries usually don't work. Blade effects are better, but melee as a whole is much more subdued with much less personality.

And that is one of the biggest failings of ETW. The game has no feel, no fire, no personally. The previous games have had loads of little touches that permeates the game with fun and interest and engage you, like having generals gain traits in m2tw, watching guys turn into great war leaders or having some insane, drunk, coward deliver a severely weird speech before battle.

None of this exists in ETW. General are boring guys you recruit, the family tree doesn't exist so you have a total lack of endearment towards them. There are very few traits and while there are some amusing ones there is way, way fewer than m2tw and it completely fails to give generals personality.

The lack of battle voices and the fact there are no pre battle speeches whatsoever remove a great deal of the personality from battles. They are fun and all, but there are no screaming, exciting charges or enthusiastic unit speech like in RTW. The battles just seem somewhat indifferent and troops feel less like people and more like currency to be spent to further your borders.

The advisor this time around are obnoxious. In RTW Victoria had loads of advice about every aspect, and funny comments and a blurb about recruiting /building every unit and building and why.

M2tw was great too with loads of advice.

The battle advisors were great for both too, with tons of advice and amusing bits,

In ETW advisors have very few bits of advice especially on the campaign map; you aren't told that much, trade isn't well explained and what's worse is that it repeats and repeats. If you have advisors on you will get the same speech every single time you get a rebellion or something and you'll get frustrated.

There is also a totally inappropriate attempt to infect advice, like the voice actor will pot an excited little “ohh” or trail off with a forlorn sounding voice when talking about rebellions and it just makes it more annoying and doesn't feel appropriate. Victoria had a gruffer, better sound to her voice and she was likeable. The advisor in ETW which I can't even remember the name of just doesn't do this.

The battle advisor is ok with a clichéd heavy British accent, but he has very few things to say and loads of his speech is from earlier total war games lifted directly with the same words and everything. It reeks of laziness and most of it isn't even appropriate or applicable for musket based combat.

The game also has some stability issues. On release the game was nigh on unplayable and would have got a 1 but after two patches its much better, tho it does occasionally crash and you will need quite a beefy pc to actually run it.

ETW just doesn't feel like a total war game. The personality and epic scale just aren't there and it has the same problems the series has always had and the attempts to add civilisation style gameplay can't cover them up. The useless melee animations and the lack of a fire button suggest the game was simply eye candy to look good in previews rather than an attempt to enhance the game.

CA have taken the total war games in a new and worse direction, where gameplay is sacrificed for looks and it is something some fans will notice and not like

At the end of the day ETW is hard to recommend. It has alot of potential and it can be addictive and fun but problems get in the way and the series hasn't evolved in diplomacy after three games now. There are promised future patches and DLC, but after 6 months the game is still in this state. Get it if you want an epic display of graphics with little complexity, but forget it if your hoping for a cinematic strategy heavy wargame.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 09/01/09

Game Release: Empire: Total War (Special Forces Edition) (AU, 03/05/09)