Format: PC | Genre: Strategy | Publisher: Paradox | Developer: Nitro Games | Release Date: 31/07/09 | RRP: £34.99

By Lewis Denby


Ultimately, the most memorable thing about East India Company is how unspectacular it is.

There are plenty of battles between opposition ships, but they’re not quite the awe-inspiring, epic events we might imagine them as.  No, these are slow, arduous affairs, fought mainly at a distance, and never entered into lightly.

These battles are by no means the focus of East India Company, but the pace at which they play out somewhat sets the tone for the whole game.  This is not a twitchy RTS, nor a particularly suspenseful one, even as the clock ticks down on your campaign.  It’s an in-depth but nevertheless leisurely title, and that’s where East India Company leaves its most distinct impression.

//Total trade
Cosmetically, it’s Total War all over.  From the 3D, aerial view campaign map, right down to the look and feel of the interface, it’s familiar territory all round.  In many ways it’s an improvement over the occasional clumsiness and unfriendliness of The Creative Assembly’s otherwise exemplary series.  Tutorial screens are brief but useful, and the slightly less intense array of campaign map options makes for a more immediately forgiving experience.  The whole thing, despite the sort of impressive historical accuracy that gets the hardcore wargaming elite all flustered, is undoubtedly geared towards a more casual audience, and the result is a game that’s happy to plod along at its own pleasant pace.

But although the presentation and penchant for naval warfare may induce a little deja-vu, this is a very different kind of strategy game.  For starters, its premise is based firmly on the water.  Land battles aren’t present; indeed, the land is largely irrelevant, with only port towns mildly customisable to boost your trading and ship-building efficiency.  The majority of the game is spent out at sea, sailing between the Indian coastline and various European nations, maintaining the trade balance between East and West and, slowly but surely, sucking the financial indemnity out of the rest of the world, rival or otherwise.

Much of your time will be eaten away by sub-menus of the campaign map, tweaking diplomatic relations or organising new trade routes.  Irritatingly, options for ship and building construction, as well as buying and selling items, are buried unnecessarily within the 3D Port View, which loads agonisingly every time you need to do a damn thing.  It’s an attractive addition, one that – presumably – intends to break up the possible monotony of maps and menu systems.  But once it’s loaded, the visuals are redundant, as all your options are still accessed via 2D menus.  Instead of shaking things up, it’s the cause of the annoying repetition.

Indeed, it’s the lack of thought behind these small design decisions that make East India Company an occasionally frustrating experience.  It’s a grind, for example, that time pauses when navigating any of the multiple menus you’ll use on a regular basis.  While there will undoubtedly be occasions when you’ll want to stop the action and spend some time tweaking things, there are others when it would be nice to leave the clock running – say, when a fleet of ships is on its lengthy travels over to India.  The journey from London to Bombay can take a good few minutes, even with the speed increased to maximum, and having to simply sit and wait while it all takes place is irritating to say the least.  Suffice it to say, you’ll have plenty of time to put the kettle on.

[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 love my games big, bold and with as many bells and whistles as can reasonably be attached. I’m the quintessential PC enthusiast, choosing my graphics cards with care and bigging up the likes of Valve whenever I can. Casual gaming does not fit very easily into this mould. As such, the oeuvre of casual gaming kings PopCap, Bigfish and the like would not be something I dabble in very often (with Peggle being the one exception), so I wasn’t expecting anything from Egyptian city builder-lite Nile Online before I opened it in my browser. Sometimes it’s nice to be surprised.

Immortal Cities: Nile Online (to give it its full, unwieldy title) is most definitely a casual game. Knocked out by developers Tilted Mill when they weren’t tinkering with the likes of Hinterland, all you need do to access the game is part with your email address. This modest little package is entirely browser-based, without the need to download anything, which is nice, though it is not entirely free (strictly speaking – I’ll get to that). No sound and minimal animation means it’ll run on just about anything with an internet connection, with the side effect that most of the time it looks and feels like you’re trying to manipulate a screenshot rather than guiding your fledgling settlement to greatness.

Credit to Tilted Mill, the only real barrier that’s between you and actually playing the game is the complete lack of a proper introduction. Even the laziest and most hackneyed products of the casual market take some steps to introduce new players to their superficial workings, but the welcoming party for Nile Online simply points you at the Wiki and buggers off, which can be a little offputting for someone who just wanted to spend their lunch break playing a game instead of reading a wall of text. Thankfully, the Wiki contains a handy step-by-step primer for the game, which I would encourage you to follow. For those of you who won’t, the gist of Nile Online is thus: it’s all about juggling numbers.

You have a few primary resources at your settlement and a set amount of labourers to gather those resources. You need wheat to bake bread to feed your workforce and trade for other resources, clay for bricks and pottery and so on. But you will never, at least in my experience, have enough labourers, so there’s a constant challenge to maximizing efficient production of all your materials. This requires you to reassign your workforce on a regular basis, depending on what it is you’re currently trying to achieve. Want to upgrade your Palace but need some extra pottery? Then you’ll need to pull some men off the fields and into the workshop while keeping an eye on how it affects your farm output. Even at its deepest, you’re just pushing numbers around on papyrus, but in small bites it’s a nice little management morsel.

Everything takes a lot of time in Nile Online too. It’s designed to be dipped into for a few minutes every so often during your day, and harvesting, building and upgrade rates are set accordingly. For instance, it took something like three hours to upgrade my Palace at one point, so all I could do was log in, start the process and log off to do something else. While this slow pace might infuriate someone used to playing a proper strategy or management game, it’s the perfect set up for a casual game that is in no position to put excess demands on your time or attention.

And once you’ve got your settlement sorted and those resources harvested you can trade them with your neighbours once you build a bit of a navy. Or at least, that’s what it says in the Wiki. In practice it’s a little more complicated than that. Each city in Nile Online is run by a different player and will have access to one special resource. In my case it was Oil, which can be used to make Perfume, but only in combination with another special resource called Kohl. If I wanted Cedar, for ships and weapons, or Bronze, for sculptures, I would have to find another player with these who was willing to trade. So to really develop your city past a certain level (every time you level up your Palace requires you to spend certain, increasing amounts of different resources) you absolutely have to interact with the wider community. You’ll have to send them scrolls directly asking for resources or trade on the open market for goods. Suddenly, out of not very much, Nile Online turns itself into a sedate and interesting little co-operative MMO.

There’s even a level above that involving sending armies off to fight bandits with other players for further rewards and access to monument building, but the game is a slow burner and I haven’t had the time to explore that in any depth. Also, while it’s initially free, after a certain level you will have to spend items called Scarabs to continue developing your society. The only way to get more Scarabs is to purchase them with real cash from Tilted Mill, but you’re certainly under no obligation to. The more frugal or less interested player can still enjoy most of the game for free without having to shell out for these microtransactions.

A very slow pace and being easy to dip into make Nile Online a nice little number to distract you every once in a while, on a coffee break or when you find you just can’t stare at that TPS report any more without cracking up. It’s also a great game to tinker with while you’re doing something else (I have it open now watching for a message from a prospective trading partner) and for the cost of absolutely zero earth monies, it’s hard to rubbish the game for its modest ambition and execution. I just wish it looked a little better.

6/10

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