[HEADING=1]Rei plays Napoleon: Total War[/HEADING]
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Napoleon: Total War is Creative Assembly's newest installment in its long-running Total War series of strategy games. Having been to Feudal Japan, Ancient Rome, Medieval Europe, and the Eighteenth Century world, this game takes the player to the Napoleonic Era. Following up 2009's Empire: Total War, Napoleon includes massive land battles and some of history's most well known naval engagements throughout the period of 1796 to 1815. Napoleon: Total War certainly is a game that would peak the interest of anyone with a taste for strategy games and the Napoleonic Era, but does its appeal as a game extend further than that or is it just another Total War game?
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Napoleon: Total War takes place, as any clever observer ought to figure out, during the lifetime and career of Napoleon Bonaparte. Although there are notes about Napoleon's early years and training during the tutorials, the bulk of the game takes place during three of his major campaigns: Italy, Egypt, and Europe. There are plenty of in-game cinematics to go with each of these campaigns, and all of them are decently well-done even if it is just a bunch of narration. This game pretty much covers Napoleon's entire military career, though there are a few omissions, with the 1813-14 campaigns being the most notable. Sadly, Napoleon's enemies don't get this same sort of detail and focus. Although you can play the Europe campaign as one of the four other great powers of Britain, Prussia, Austria, and Russia, none of them get any of the cinematics or story-driven campaigns like the French do. There is little question that this game is very much French-centric in all of its affairs. That may be just fine for most players, but it does hurt the game's potential because there is plenty of room to make the game more about the era itself rather than the career of one general.
Probably Napoleon: Total War's biggest highlight is in its attention to detail and for creating a game that truly feels set in the Napoleonic Era. It is obvious that the developers over at the Creative Assembly spent a lot of time researching this era, and you can see it clearest in the military units that the player is able to command. The uniforms are spot on to my knowledge, as are the ships, cannons, and everything else regarding how things are supposed to look. The player will also have a large number of historical generals that you will be able to have commanding your armies or navies in the field. Those leaders are not just legends like Bonaparte, Wellington, or Nelson, but also the lesser commanders such as Ney, Murat, Bagration, Scharnhorst, Villeneuve, and so on. The game certainly has an impressive appearance, and that helps the player feel as if the battles that they are fighting really do look something like they actually did in reality. This is even more apparent in the game's historical battles which not only are fought over the game sorts of terrain as the actual battles, but even includes the units that were historically at the battles being fought, such as seeing the Old Guard at Waterloo or HMS Victory at Trafalgar. A lot of this sort of stuff probably will not get noticed by those who don't know much about the period and are just ordering a bunch of troops around, but to the informed gamer these little historical touches add a lot to the game's overall quality. In terms of creating a setting and of having an appearance of historical accuracy, Napoleon: Total War does a very good job.
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The game play to be found in Napoleon: Total War will be familiar to anyone who has played a Total War game before. Actually one of the biggest misconceptions I have heard about this game is that people think it is an expansion pack for Empire: Total War. However, considering that Napoleon is basically Empire with a bunch of new units and taking place in the years immediately following that game, I guess that misconception can be forgiven. Napoleon: Total War is, more or less, a stand-alone expansion pack to Empire, its most recent predecessor in the Total War series, and the game play for both of these games is pretty much the same. I did not play Empire: Total War, but that game and Napoleon run on the same engine, have the same combat styles, and are only really different in their settings and a handful of game play changes Napoleon made to try to improve the game from Empire. With that said however, for anyone who has played a Total War game before, Napoleon: Total War will probably be very familiar to you in how it plays, for better or worse.
For those who are less familiar with the game play, Napoleon: Total War, and basically all Total War games for that matter, has two different modes of game play. The first of these is the campaign game, which is a turn-based area where you control a nation's armies, navies, economy, technological development, and all that other sort of stuff. A good way to think of how this part of the game works is to consider it to be very similar to the Civilization games, except there is obviously a greater emphasis on military affairs. You manage cities and build improvements within them that either let you build more military units or give some other benefit. The campaign game is the strategic aspect where the player deals with the overall world situation and plans out how they are going to defeat their enemies with the armies that they build and where the player decides to send those armies to fight. The campaign aspect of the game is reasonably interesting on its own, and players who have enjoyed strategy games like Civilization or Europa Universalis will probably feel right at home. If you do not like either of those sorts of games however, then the campaign game in Napoleon: Total War probably will not appeal very much.
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The other aspect of the game however, and the one that the Total War games is most famous for, are the battles. In Civilization or Europa Universalis, when armies meet they just fight on the campaign map and the game tells you how it turned out, with the player having little to no control over what happens. In Napoleon: Total War, you are able to go to the battles themselves and play general in a real-time, but still pausable, tactical setting. You take direct command of hundreds or thousands of men as you position them on the field and attack the enemies forces in a variety of ways of your choosing. On land you can use a variety of different tactics such as forming lines of soldiers to shoot volleys of musket fire at the enemy, charging in with swords or bayonets, and much more. The naval battles of this game also include similar variation, allowing players to choose what your ships try to shoot at on an enemy ship (Hull, Masts, or the Crew), attempt to board the enemy ships to capture them, or just simply blowing them all up from a distance. There is obviously much more to be said here, but the gist of what is said here ought to be easy to determine. If you are interested in playing the part of a general or admiral, leading armies and fleets in tactical battles, and being able to decide exactly how these battles turn out, the Total War games, with Napoleon being its most recent addition, is still probably the game series that you will find for this purpose.
However, Napoleon: Total War does have several unfortunate flaws in its game play that detract from the overall experience and make this game less compelling than some of its predecessors. As mentioned before, this game is almost completely focused on Napoleon's career, and so the other nations involved, though they have their selections of historical troops units, ships, and leaders, still are lacking in the overall presentation of the game. The most obvious place where this is seen is in the selection of historical battles, which basically are just a large selection of the era's most famous encounters: Austerlitz, Trafalgar, Borodino, Waterloo, and many more. Also, aside from the naval battles, Napoleon is commanding in all of these battles and historically won all of them except for Waterloo, which means that many battles that ought to be in this game, such as Leipzig or Salamanca, are not present. The problem is that, sometimes, I don't want to play as just Napoleon or just the French in these battles. Creative Assembly did come out with a free DLC (yes, a free DLC) shortly after the game's release that allowed for the player to play as the British at Waterloo, but aside from that you play as the French in all of these battles. In some cases this is alright as I'd rather not be playing as the Mamelukes at the Battle of the Pyramids, but on the other hand being forced to play as the French in Nelson's crushing naval victories at the Nile or Trafalgar is something I'd rather be on the giving rather than receiving end of. I can understand that this game is supposed to be about Napoleon and his empire, but I feel as if there was some serious missed opportunities in this game where, if certain areas were expanded, could have resulted in a more complete game about the whole Napoleonic Era rather than being a game that is basically all about Napoleon's conquests. Even Napoleonic France gets boring after a while.
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But having a lack of options in the historical battles is not the only problem that plagues Napoleon: Total War, nor is it the most severe of them. The most glaring flaw of Napoleon: Total War is in its AI both in the campaign and on the battlefields. The AI in the Total War games have always had a few funky problems, such as massing too many troops on the battlefield in one place that make easy targets for artillery or the absolutely whacked out diplomacy AI that likes to randomly declare war on people, including their friends. At first glance, Napoleon: Total War does not seem to have as many of these severe problems with the AI, and I personally did not encounter the famed diplomacy problem that has afflicted Total War games in the past. The campaign AI does reasonably well at managing their affairs and the battle AI can be quite challenging for a new player during the first few hours of playing. The AI to be found in the Total War games is not what one would call stupid, but as a player spends more and more time in the game, they will come across limitations that ultimately can make the game much less interesting and replayable.
Unfortunately, it is only a matter of time before the player finds the AI flaws within this game. The early warning signs can be found in the campaigns, when it quickly becomes obvious that the AI is mainly running off of scripts rather than actually thinking on its own. In the two mini campaigns of Italy and Egypt, the AI is decent because of the smaller scale and the more focused atmosphere, and so scripts are able to act as effective opponents. In the Europe campaign however, what little scripting may have been in place seems to have little effect because the AI's of every nation seem to have the same tendency of building large land armies and massing them around their capital city with little to no offensive action to be taken. It becomes obvious over time that the AI simply is just not very good at managing the nations in this game. The French campaign AI is not the all-consuming ogre that it should be, the British tend to build land armies rather than maintaining its super-powered navy, and Russia's AI makes that country pitifully easy to invade, though still not so much during the winter. In the battle part of the game, the AI is a bit better, but after a while the player will notice that the AI often falls prey to the same tactics over and over again that make the battles incredibly easy to win once the player figures that out. Once the player figures out the AI's limitations and begins to exploit them, Napoleon: Total War's single-player appeal drains quickly as the game becomes too easy or tedious to play even on the highest difficulty levels. In an overall sense, Napoleon: Total War's AI, though not game-breaking, does have enough problems that keep this game from being as stellar as it ought to be.
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Napoleon: Total War is a game that does an impressive job of portraying the Napoleonic Era but unfortunately is afflicted by a few flaws that keep the game from being as good as it should have been. The game is heavily French-centric, but this is only really a fault in the sense that there is content that could have been put into this game that may have made it better overall. It also remains very much rooted in the game play style of the Total War series for better or worse with its excellent tactical battle system and an AI that tends to behave in strange ways. Someone who has played a Total War game and either has played them to death or came to dislike them probably will not find this game very interesting because it is essentially the same game as its predecessors. Someone who has deep interest in the Napoleonic Era will likely be able to forgive this game's flaws and enjoy it very much, at least for the short term. But for someone who is more interested in the game play than the setting, Napoleon's flaws will hurt the game's replayability in the long run. Had the AI for this game been a bit better done in either the campaign or the battles, preferably both, then Napoleon: Total War would be a truly great game. Instead, Napoleon: Total War is a game for people who are interested in the Napoleonic Era and crave the idea of a strategy game based in it, but outside of that niche group this game is not likely to appeal to a larger audience.
- Rei
