|
The Battle Collection (Medieval Total War & Viking Invasion Double Pack)
Activision (
14 November, 2003 )
Video Games |
| Our
Price |
: |
£
14.97 |
|
List
Price
|
:
|
£
24.99
|
|
You save £10.02 (40% off) |
| Prices
subject to change. |
usually dispatched within 24 hours. |
| |
|
| |
|
Almost Perfect  |
|
First, this is a massive and incredibly impressive game, that is both challenging and spectacular. Like Shogun: Total War, the game is split into a strategy map based game and a real time battle simulator. It is basically like Stratego except your skill and intelligence as a general and political leader will determine your fate rather than the roll of the dice. The strategy game is much more involved than Shogun and diplomacy plays a much greater role. Also, instead of just building ports, watching the money come in and jumping all over the board like you could in Shogun, you have to build ships before you can cross the seas, and establish trade routes before you will receive any income. But the most significant and impressive change is not visible until you actually play the game. If you have played Shogun and think you will just employ the same strategies you are in for a rude awakening. They will not work. The geo-political situation is vastly different and more complicated (not least because you have far more to conquer and far more enemies), and therefore the mindset and strategy required changes too. To make a game that allows you think in two completely different ways about the problems of building an empire is a rare achievement. The Viking Invasions add on is worth the extra because it gives you a second game and lots of improvements and upgrades. "What then," you might ask, "is wrong with it?" There are only four things I would change about this game. The first is that the developers have not heeded the call of many fans of Shogun to have a multi-player version of the strategy map based game. This continues to be disappointing because just having battles robs them of a broader context and therefore of the feeling that there is something at stake beyond a single battle. The second is more a suggestion that may or may not be possible. If you have played these kind of games before you will know that unless you have a network or play over the internet that they are extremely anti-social. Would it not therefore be great if a number of people could play a single game? In other words, you and your friends choose a faction each and play each other and the computer on a single machine at the same time. When it came to fighting the battles there would have to be some way of deciding who got to fight it and who has the computer fight for them, but that could be worked out. The third thing is that sea battles have to be automatically resolved and it would have been incredible if you could fight them personally as well, but perhaps this is just being greedy. The last point is relatively minor, but if you liked the animations in Shogun then you will be disappointed that there are none in Medieval Total War. While I can see that they were left out because most people only watch them once or twice and then skip them, it is still nice to see your assassin at work and to watch ambassadors trying to win your favour. Finally, sometimes a game comes along that does so much so well that it raises your expectations, and Medieval Total War is one of those games. This is hours, possibly too many hours, of challenging and rewarding fun and enjoyment.
|
|
My favourite in the TW series, but room for improvement |
There are few games that hold my attention to the point where I find myself thinking at work about how I will play it that night. Its not something you could say about Unreal Tournament, for instance, though I am an undoubted fan of that series too.The Total War series, however, has supplanted Age of Empires as my strategy game of choice (although in saying that I dont include Championship Manager, which will always remain a personal favourite of mine), due to its attention to detail over the somewhat abstract nature of Microsofts attempts at historical re-enactment. The grand scale of the strategic elements, combined with the ability to view the hacknslash realities of battlefield tactics, make Total War the epitome of sword-and-shield simulation. Medieval Total War allows the player to take control of a burgeoning European state in the early medieval period, with the aim of progressing to domination of Europe and the Levant. The Viking Invasion expansion pack is predominantly Britain-based, focusing on the late-Dark Ages struggles of various Celtic, Saxon, Pictish and Norse factions for control of the British Isles.
The full install of the game allows the playing of four slightly different time periods - 1 British Isles based, and 3 Europe-wide - and various difficulty levels allow for many many (many) hours of engaging game-play, even after youve won and lost with all the various factions. You might now be asking, if its so good, why only 4 stars?
Unfortunately, Ive found the strategic elements of the game pale in comparison to the level of detail in the battlefield encounters. After a while the running of a faction takes on something of a mindless quality - build fort, train soldiers, send out agent, build better fort, train better soldiers, assassinate agent... Im not saying that the game wont keep you entertained, but once youve played it a few times there wont be too many suprises (time for a higher difficulty level at that point).
Rome Total War, the next iminent instalment in the series, will apparently address some of these concerns, dispensing with the rigid territory boundaries found in this and the previous Japanese Shogun-era versions of the game, and replacing them with a more dynamic system based on the amount of control a player can enforce over a specific area of territory. For a fuller explanation of the new game youll just have to wait until some lucky reviewer has played it. In all, and until Rome Total Wars release in the spring, this expanded version of Medieval Total War is a fantastic way to spend hours of your life watching tiny simulations of warriors hack each other to pieces - and you will spend hours of your life, trust me.
|
Simply the best  |
I have got to admit, I love medieval strategies. I also love decent war games and this has both of my favourite types of game in one.Lets start with the facts, It is a medieval strategy game with probably the greatest battle simulator ever. This is the big cheese in Medieval gameplay, covering both economical and military game types better than most other games specialising in one of the types. The economical campaign is turnbased and is set over the known world from the 11th to the 15th century. In it you get to choose many things, from the buildings being built to the General who governs the province. In military battle, you can control up to 16 units, ranging from 20 (the best) men per unit to 100 (the men who do the fighting) men per unit. They also have many variants, in the campaign, the units can gain Valour (how good they are at fighting) Armour (how much protection they can get till they are killed) and weapons (how good there weapons are). This means that it is not always the biggist army that wins (I found this out when I lost 1000 men against the Arabs for a province I only kept for 2 years)and so is more realistic. The battles are like time commanders, the graphics are good enough and you can control every aspect of the battle field. With siege engines, you have the option of having a projectile eye view as the rock/missile slams into 100 unorganised rebels.
The only problem I had was that my main computer couldnt take the campaign. Before buying, look carefully at the Sys. Req. If your computer chipset is not there, go into a computer shop and buy a surpported chipset, It is worth it! The best game ever for PC, you have my word on it.
|
|
