Format: PC | Genre: RTS | Publisher: Paradox | Developer: Paradox | Release date: 07/08/09 | RRP: £29.99

By Greg Giddens

The Germans have moved military hardware into the Rhineland and invaded Poland. As England, perhaps I should feel a responsibility to do something about this situation.

But screw it. The Spanish are only just recovering form civil war, so I’ll invade them and join the Axis forces. It’s my choice and, for better or worse, history will certainly remember me for it.

//Reshaping history
Hearts of Iron III allows you to make a lot of these choices. This epic strategy title begins as an accurate simulation of the years surrounding WW2, but can end up with you playing almost any scenario you can imagine. It’s an incredible achievement, and once you get past the complexity it’s rather enjoyable.

The ability to play as any nation is absolutely fantastic fun. The sheer amount of options and scenarios available is really only limited by your imagination. Haven’t you always wondered what would have happened if Poland was able beat the Germans back? In Hearts of Iron III, in theory, you can find out. Theoretically speaking, anything is possible, but due to the realistic parameters of the game you’re very unlikely to be able to change anything major with any of the smaller countries. The big world players, however, do have that potential – Italy choosing to support the allies, for example, or Russia choosing to support Germany.

Before you get to make these world changing decisions, though, you need to learn how to play the game – and believe me, this is no easy task. Heats of Iron III is a complex game, and the sheer scale alone is overwhelming. Part of me wants to criticise this, but honestly, without it, Hearts of Iron III would lose its individuality and charm. It’s also mainly just a case of learning to understand its ways. Hearts of Iron III is what I would call an almost completely realised RTS game, in that it contains everything you could want from an such a title. Simplifying it would potentially compromise the scale.

Hearts of Iron III may be comprised of everything an RTS game could ever need, but it’s far away from the type of strategy most gamers will be used to. It’s substantially deeper and grander in scale. For many the water might seem too deep, but you certainly should dive in.

The all-text tutorial does its best to gently introduce you to the complex environment of Hearts of Iron III, with its clear instructions amongst an amusing little tale. It’s almost properly funny, and certainly distracts from the lengthy tutorial. The typos are distracting too – it’s something that certainly doesn’t ruin the game, but it does draw attention to itself, and raises questions about the level of quality control during development.

//Knowledge is power
With the six tutorials over, you may feel ready to take on the game, but you’re not. No, don’t argue with me. You’re not ready. The interface is vast, with so many options that a further tutorial is required for you to really understand how to play Hearts of Iron III. Unfortunately, there isn’t one. It’s time to actually read the manual.

[Continues...]

You’re going to take what follows as a recommendation, aren’t you? Please don’t. You almost certainly don’t want to spend your time and money on Stalin vs. Martians (or, to use its full name, Stalin vs. Martians: The Unknown Pages of the Second World War – Game of the Year Edition). It is, quite plainly, not very good at all. Anything I say may not be held against me. Just trust me on this one. Forget it ever happened.

Good old Mother Russia and friends deliver some fascinating games, but it’s not exactly a joyous output. There’s a bleakness and sincerity to this school of development, one that excels in evoking an inescapable sense of doom. Pathologic’s a game about an unstoppable plague, hell-bent on wiping out civilisation. Cryostasis is the haunting tale of an ice-bound ship, and the tragic fate of those onboard. Hopping across to neighbouring Ukraine, STALKER and its sort-of-sequel paint a chilling picture of the Chernobyl disaster, and place us in a cold, unforgiving and isolating environment.

Stalin vs. Martians is a game about Stalin taking on Martians.

This is a thoroughly surreal experience. It’s as if someone grabbed the RTS genre, multiplied its speed by ten and then removed all the strategy. It’s as if you were to take Borat, remove all its clever socio-political commentary, and just laugh at the silly accents. It’s really not very good at all, but at the same time, it’s gleefully hilarious. But mainly stupid. Really, really stupid.

It seems unfair to lambaste it for this, though. Stupidity is clearly the core intention here. This is a game sporting a completely irrelevant checkbox in the options menu that asks you whether you like cats. It’s a game where clicking on your troops triggers phrases such as “My name is Ivan! I like you!” and attacking an enemy produces yells of “Speak Russian or die!” It’s a game where you get to fire cannons at giant, blue elephants, and where the loading screens feature Communist photography with cartoon aliens Photoshopped in. At the start of each mission, you receive a letter from Stalin himself, signed off with “XOXO”. And the end of each mission, you wonder what the hell just happened.

You really don’t want to buy it.

It’s really not worth it, even though it’s enormously good fun. Once you realise it’s basically just a game of ‘charge at the opponents until they croak’, the brainless pointing and clicking becomes somewhat cathartic, and the sheer lunacy of the proceedings is rather refreshing. It’s incredibly tasteless, but in such an infantile way that it’s impossible to be offended. It’s colourful, and quirky, and features the most hysterically, brilliantly awful soundtrack known to man. In an odd sort of way, it’s incredibly amusing.

Total fifteen-minute amusement, though. It drags its heels something rotten when playing for any longer. You run aliens over with tanks and collect the pick-ups they drop to build your “economy.” Which you spend on calling for reinforcements, with which you can run over more aliens. If the game doesn’t chug to a halt in the meantime, you can charge around the map in search of objectives that don’t always make sense or aren’t properly explained. You repeat this until the end of the game. Or, rather, you don’t, as there’s about as much chance of you seeing it through as there is of, well, Stalin having ever taken on hordes of rainbow-coloured Martians.

Which is why you shouldn’t buy it.

The score’s for the normal people. The people who require competent “gameplay”, an engaging story, or – you know – anything to make any sense at all. The people who quite rightly don’t enjoy paying seventeen pounds for what is essentially a pretty awful game. But it is to take nothing away from Stalin vs. Martians’ trio of developers. This is quite clearly the product of a collective of minds working towards a common, if absolutely ludicrous, goal. It totally succeeds. A weird part of my soul loves them for that.

You’re not me. Don’t buy it.

3/10

I could probably be convinced by an argument as to why Empire is either the best or the worst Total War game yet. It’s easily the most epic, the most ambitious and grandiose of The Creative Assembly’s efforts thus far, with a vast campaign mode and tonnes of incidental details thrown into the mix. But with the ambition comes a slight lack of polish, and a collection of annoyances and let-downs.

These problems are frequent but minor, mainly amounting to odd bugs, stability issues on certain machines, and a slight lack of logic to certain proceedings. They’re small things that seem inconsequential to begin with, but as time goes on they start to grate. The result is a game that was initially heading for a score well into the 90s falling down the ranks a little – still a phenomenally brilliant piece of turn-based/real-time strategy, but one with a tendency to snap you out of its incredible world a little too regularly for comfort.

Often, you don’t care. If you do, it’s because you’re constantly willing Empire to go that tiny step further, to polish itself sufficiently to support its monumental scope. The first thing you’re likely to take in when attempting the Grand Campaign is how thrillingly, overwhelmingly, ludicrously enormous this game actually is. There’s practically the entire globe awaiting you, and your methods of progress are widespread. Playing as Great Britain, I was advised first to take control of The Thirteen Colonies, by helping them eradicate French and Native American threats nearby. But this was only one approach. I also tried focusing my efforts on getting a stronghold in India, then moving back West across the campaign map. On another go, I waited patiently, promoted free trade, built up a staggeringly powerful economy and army, and went straight for the throat of mainland Europe.

These are just three of the wealth of opportunities available when playing as Britain. Play as any other country, and you’ll have equally startling scope to manipulate the other regions on the map, making your way slowly towards your nation’s exclusive victory conditions. A single completion of the Grand Campaign, assuming you play a full one and not a half-length one, takes a hundred years of game time. That’s 200 turns, each lasting anywhere between ten minutes and an hour, depending on how thoughtful you’re being, and how frequently you’re engaging in battles. There’s also a completely separate campaign centred around Europe’s move into North America, and the nation’s eventual independence. Empire: Total War is huge.

This smaller campaign in America masquerades as an introduction to the Total War schemata for less experienced players. Embarking on the Grand Campaign without first tackling Road to Independence is something of a death wish, particularly for those who aren’t too canny with their Total Warring. Far from being a mere tutorial, though, Road to Independence could succeed as a full game in itself. It’s tighter and more guided than the Grand Campaign, but at times that’s more than welcome, and the historical narrative running through it keeps everything captivating and contextual. Though it starts in a particularly straightforward manner, the challenge ramps up to delicious levels later on. I honestly think, on occasion, I might have found myself enjoying it more than the full campaign.

Once again, the balance between the real-time and turn-based elements is sublime. You’ll spend much of your time on the campaign map, playing Empire like a digital game of Risk, calculating your movements and strategically planning years ahead of execution. In addition to the warfare, there’s a fair amount of logistical, economic and diplomatic strategy incorporated, though those wanting to stick purely on the military side will be pleased to discover you can ask the computer to take care of the rest for you. It’s quite possible to play the entire thing as a board game, ensuring your armies are strong enough to auto-resolve any combat situations without ever entering the battlefield. Some armchair generals may prefer the game this way, hands-free of the bloody, visceral reality of the actual fighting. To play like this would be a shame, however. Empire presents the grittiest, most brutal and honest portrayal of war in the whole series.

At times, it’s not quite there. The new naval battles can be breathtaking to behold, but the very nature of them means they’re particularly sluggish, the ships difficult to manoeuvre. It’s difficult to think of ways The Creative Assembly could have improved these encounters, though – I don’t imagine their real life counterparts to have been high-octane experiences. Perhaps more frustrating is the difficulty of controlling large amounts of troops on the battlefield. When you have a vast number of different units in your command, it can be fiddly to select and manipulate the particular ones you want, particularly in the heat of the action; and the AI is very occasionally suspect, getting tangled up with itself a little too often, or failing to properly engage the opposition.

More frequently, the 3D engine is a joy to behold. It doesn’t look particularly cutting-edge, but it realises the gritty nature of this warfare sublimely. Attacking a fort, with an unfeasible mass of troops all charging at the structures, cannonballs flying wildly through the air, men climbing up rope ladders only to be immediately shot back down, is one of the most epically engaging and exhilarating things I’ve ever seen in any videogame, let alone a strategy one. Witnessing the mass of bodies lying face down in the dirt in the aftermath takes some of the joy away from any victories, and encourages you to think carefully about the lives that were lost during these terrible conflicts.

It’s real, visceral and upsetting. It’s crushingly addictive and inspiringly enormous. And it’s a game that, despite its faults, has quickly become one of my all-time genre favourites. Empire: Total War entirely lives up to its name. It’s a grand, complete and palpable battlefield of careful, tactical carnage.

8/10