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Thursday, October 23, 2008 |
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Commander Napoleon at War
By LarryMac @ 5:50 PM :: 2613 Views ::  :: PC
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Commander: Napoleon At War is Slitherine Studios’ follow-up to the widely acclaimed Commander: Europe At War. The game allows you to play out several individual campaigns from the Napoleonic Era or play out one grand all-encompassing campaign covering the entire period.
Up front, the game is highly customizable. You can play as either the French armies or the coalition forces that are arrayed against them. You can grant either side a small or large advantage to adjust the AI or impose penalties upon your opponent, if playing in multi-player mode. Other options allow you to control the impact of the weather, your ability to see what your opponent is up to, the length of the game and the length of each turn and more.
Getting going in the game is a bit of a chore. The interface is anything but intuitive and, unlike some real-time strategy games, the turns have no set sequence of phases – you can move a unit into battle, rout the enemy and pursue them and still come back and create new units, place them on the field and move other units later. This takes some getting used to, as it becomes hard to tell which units you’ve already used in the round as your army size grows. Reading the directions is a must on this game! The tutorial option is of no use on your first trip through the game. Since the turns don’t occur in phases, the game doesn’t tell you what to do next or when you’re done. This may be the biggest problem with the game: just figuring out how to start playing it. Read the directions and then play some single-player games and give yourself all of the advantages that you can to get the hang of it.
The graphics are also a little weak. Admittedly, that’s not generally a strong point in the real-time strategy arena, but in this game it can become a nuisance. Your basic army is made up of three infantry types and three cavalry types that look very similar on the map. The levels to which you can zoom in or out seem either too small for you to tell what units are where or too close to tell what’s going on. The map also makes it difficult to tell what territories belong to your allies or your enemies or neutral territories, making it hard to plan out your troop movements, since you don’t always know which routes you can take and which areas you can enter. These issues, though, improve as you get used to the game but can be a real obstacle early on.
Once you get the hang of the game, though, it is definitely immersive. Your ability to control the length of the campaigns that you play, as well as the other options, add a lot of replay-ability to the game. Even in single player mode, the AI is better than a lot of strategy games out there. With control down to the unit level, multiple offensive and defensive options, the ability to conduct scientific research to upgrade your troops, random weather issues and naval battles, this game can challenge you like few others. That minute level of detail can make longer campaigns bog down, though, so the shorter battles are preferable unless you’re willing to devote a lot of time to the game – not likely to happen in multi-player online mode.
Commander: Napoleon At War is a game that makes you work hard at it. Ultimately, good game play and solid replay-ability are buried beneath the obtuse interface and clumsy graphics.
6 out of 10
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