While incredibly hard to get into for newcomers, Europa Universalis III offers a supreme amount of depth that hardcore strategy fans will lap up.
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And combat is more complex than you think. There are terrain and troop composition issues.
Also, the reason you have no control on the battle details themselves is in line with the whole philosophy of the game itself. You are the bigman. Fighting wars is the job of the generals. You give the bigger commands.
I know reviews are inevitably subjective, but this one IMHO is insufficiently objective, because it tries hard not to review the game in its own terms.
cheers
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Let's face it, the guy has no business reviewing a Grand Strategy game.
Sure, put Warcraft into his hands, or by all means M:TW. But for the love of everything that is holy, keep that simpleton away from EU!
His assertion that M:TW has more strategic depth than EU really says it all.
As a humour piece, this review is top notch, however. The reviewer spouts several bits of nonsense that I think may become permanent jokes in the internet ether so in this sense maybe he has actually accomplished something here.
Please stay with tactical resource-gathering games in the future, Ian. For your sake and mine.
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Uh...this is not Age of Empires. France in 1453 was larger and more populous than England, and had a larger army. HIS problems with strategy are just that, his. It is not the game's fault that he can not execute basic warfare without a popup force feeding him instructions. I think his referring to the 1,000 man regiments as squads is the most telling in this aspect. This is NOT Starcraft or CoH. This is NOT a tactical RTS. This IS a grand strategy game, and his attacking it for not having RTS elements is sad.
Yes, all opinions are subjective, but people expect a certain level of objectivity from professional outlets. This reads exactly like the Neverwinter Nights 2 review debacle that was eventually removed because it was a thinly veiled rant about Dungeons and Dragons based games.
The writer came into this and attacked the game because a) he apparently has problems being able to play games without a little voice commanding him on exactly how to win, b) for not having hallmarks of a type of strategy game that it is not even part of, and then attempts to blame these things on a "clunky interface".
For shame.
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There is too much of an internet bully pact mentality on forums nowadays. I doubt whether half of you really care about this game. I rather think this forum has been used as a way of attacking someone without fear of retribution (particularly the posts with personal attacks requiring language editing).
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But what I think most people are simply *amazed* by is the attitude and direction that Ian chose to infuse his review with. This has all been covered above but by setting out to make a comparison with more "tactical" games he, perhaps inadvertently, missed out on or dismissed a whole range of features. Almost the entire game actually.
Its not a matter of the diplomacy or economics being hidden away or unavailable but rather someone jumping into the game in the belief that the goal was to direct his "squads" in battle. The only time that diplomacy is even mentioned is when Ian complains that he has to declare war in order to attack another nation!
I must ask just what the reviewer's preconceptions were. Was it suggested to him that this was a game handled on a strategic level? A game almost the opposite of C&C? There is no suggestion that Ian, either during the review or in his following comment, grasped this distinction. And yet we are supposed to have some faith in his professional opinion?
How does that reflect on you? Certainly it is your prerogative as to whether you select someone familiar with the field when giving out review assignments. But then what worth has this review, or this site, if we readers cannot trust the review to be carried out by someone familiar with the genre?
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What 's bad about needing ships to be at sea before moving troops onto them? It's the exact same concept used in most wargames. For example, M:TW.
Though in reality, EUIII should not be compared to M:TW. As has been pointed out, the Total War genre is 80% tactical combat, 20% strategy.
It should be compared to Galactic Civilizations II, if anything.
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Nor should such a silly reason put you off trying one of the best if not the best Grand Strategy title currently out there.
Of course, if Grand Strategy (as opposed to tactical games, such as for instance Starcraft, Warcraft, Age of Empires, Dune II, Command & Conquer, you see where I'm heading right. Tactical games, not Strategy games) is not your kind of game then by all means steer clear of EU3 because it's going to be confusing, difficult, boring and clunky!
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Yes, I'm well aware that he has had extensive play time with RTSs and turn-based strategy games (and that he's been gaming since the Amiga) but all of that is irrelevant.
EU3 does not focus on tactical combat as it is a grand strategy game, and judging from Ian's review, in the many days that he had to play the game, he failed to grasp this concept.
Instead of realizing that he was dealing with a completely different genre, it is apparent that he chose to spend all of his time and energy focusing on why EU3 is not a tactical RTS or turn-based game.
This is an unprofessional and totally misguided way to review a game. It would be the same as handing the Oblivion to a reviewer who has had extensive experience with FPSs such as Doom, Quake, and Unreal.
It is likely that in such a case, the reviewer would deem Oblivion to be slow and unwieldy because the combat is overwhelmingly melee-based and too much time needs to be spent allocating stat points.
A reviewer could spend days with Oblivion, and if s/he does not understand that Oblivion is an RPG played from the first-person perspective rather than a first person SHOOTER, and decides to give Oblivion a low score out of the misguided belief that Oblivion is a poor FPS, it would go a long way towards damaging not only the reviewer's credibility but the credibility of the people who decided that such a review would actually be helpful to their readers.
This is exactly what has happened with Ian and his review of EU3. Ian expected an RTS/turn-based strategy game, and in the course of playing EU3, clung steadfastly to this belief, and then based on this misconception, reviewed EU3 as a run-of-the-mill tactical strategy game as opposed to what it actually is: a grand strategy game.
This is why his review is being panned as unhelpful and uninformative by the community here, and I suggest for future reference, that the Pro-G staff take its readers' complaints to heart.
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I find nothing about the review insightful or helpful from the standpoint of coming to this site to learn about the title. Instead it simply comes off as a rant against his own frustrations and inability to grasp the fundamentals of the game.
While Im sure the author is a decent reviewer of less complex more graphically intense simple games, he is clearly out of his league with this title. It is a disservice to your readers to keep an intellectually dishonest review of this nature posted here.
The author would have been better off simply stating he could not grasp the complexity of the game rather that post a low score for the title to make him feel better about his own inadequacies.
Nowhere in the review does he even mention the deep random and scripted event engine in the game. This single feature alone adds immense re-playability to the game due to the fact no two games will EVER be exactly the same even if you play the same country 1000 times in a row. Not to mention the fact the scripted events adds personality to the different countries themselves.
Of course there are dozens and dozens of other points about the actual game he failed to cover, but anyone who really took the time to play the game enough to do a fair and adequate review would have already known that.
In the end I feel sorry for the reviewer since he was clearly out of his league and this single review will probably do more to damage his credibility with readers than the combined weight of 100 questionably bad reviews for titles he would have been better suited to review.
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I agree about the piling on that goes on with this sort of thing - a pack mentality if you will, but it's the nature of the internet. By the same token, however, it's honest. People will speak their mind without having to hold back, and in this case the reviewer had better have a thick hide because he is way out there with respect to his review. One only need to see what every other reviewer has written and how they rate it (hint: it has 8's and 9's without exception).
The editors of this site back him up using the defense "it's his opinion". Well, my 14 year old daughter could review it and give it 5 out of 10 and I could also defend her review saying "it's her opinion". There's a world of difference between an opinion and a qualified opinion, and a qualified opinion is not too much to expect, is it?
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As for Pro-G staff taking notice of these comments - we've done little else all day. In the past we've stayed away from games of this type simply because we didn't feel qualified to review them. In this case we felt we had a writer (who felt the same) who could tackle such a game, but it seems we've underestimated the complexities of the game.
At no point have we tried to hide behind the "it's an opinion line," but Ian wrote the review based on playing the game for an extended period. He played the game enough to form an opinion, and while the review might not have stated his experience clearly enough, those opinions were still as valid as anyone else's. It is where those opinions came from that have caused such a reaction.
Many people coming to the game may well do so from a background in RTS and turn-based strategy (I would hope it's not just fans of the previous games that purchase EU III), so I hope everyone can see this review as what it is, particularly when the changes have been made. We want to be as fair as possible and fully admit that the original review didn't do this as successfully as we would have liked.
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I certainly DON'T think it's ridiculous for someone who isn't an expert in a certain genre to tackle a game for review. By all means, find a quality reviewer who ISN'T an expert in the genre, get them to read the manual and do the tutorials and review the game in an objective manner. They are welcome to give it 5/10 as long as their complaints are clear and justified.
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