![]() It also greatly benefits from the more focused map areas and concentrated theme in terms of the goals and time. The gameplay in real-time is similar to Empire but offers improvements and fine tuning as the development team clearly became more comfortable matching the engine with the concept. The other two are more story focused, covering Napoleon’s famous invasion of Egypt as well as his early campaigns in Italy. The game featured four campaigns, two traditional freeform setups where the player takes control of Napoleon’s expansion across Europe or oppose him as one of either the UK, Russia, Austria or Prussia. Napoleon: Total War took the formula from Empire and improved it in in some key areas. It was fun and certainly had its moments but it never fully managed to emerge from the feeling that this was an opportunity missed. The battles were certainly better, if a little glitchy (I particularly remember units just getting stuck on fences rather than climbing over them) and offered a great representation of combat at the height of Empire and colonisation. There was very little holding the entire package together. It often felt unmanageable and unwieldy, as well as there being a palpable disconnect between the three different areas. The problems arose in the scaling, offering very little change from the traditional campaign experience but massively increasing the size of the operation. For those of you who haven’t played it, the map is divided into three “theatres” – Europe, the East coast of America and the Indian sub-continent. The campaign map was where most of the issues came to the fore, with the scale of the thing proving to be a detriment to the detail it was feasible to include. Sadly, the game itself did not manage to realise the full potential of the idea. On the face of it, Empire: Total War looked like it was going to do something really cool in advancing the series hundreds of years further forward than any previous entry. The better of the two games to be made on the OG engine, it has a special place in the history of the franchise and should be respected as such. The Viking Invasion expansion is also an all-time classic. In spite of all the improvements to later games, I really miss those. Other interesting gameplay elements like the Crusades or Jihad, depending on your faction religion, were introduced and it was the last game to feature those little chess-like pieces you had to drag and drop around the campaign map. The game had updated visuals from its predecessor, albeit running on the same TW Engine 1, and all of Europe and parts of the Middle-East to play with. I managed to nab a copy of this on release day way back in 2002 with my dad before spending the entire day massacring the Scottish in interesting and unusual ways (nothing personal against the lovely Scots, they’re just an immediate issue when you pick England for the campaign). ![]() It’s worth no more than that.Īs with the last entry, Medieval: Total War has not aged particularly brilliantly. Honestly give this one between 0 and 4 minutes of your time. Yes, it was a buggy, awkward mess with pseudo-historical context as a setting, but I could go some way to letting that go if it wasn’t so unbelievably boring. The Barbarian Invasion expansion for the first Total War game (which had a similar map to Thrones) was amongst my favourite Total War campaigns ever, but this release disappointed at almost every turn. I hesitate to even include this one on the list, firstly because the loosely defined “Saga” element of its title may mean that it shouldn’t count as part of the main series, and secondly because it is essentially the Fredo Corleone of the Total War series. Here goes… Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia It really did turn out to be an incredibly difficult job, trying to separate my own personal preferences for certain eras from the quality of the games themselves. I am a bit of a Total War fanboy and history nerd at large, so I thought it pertinent to run you through the very best (and worst) the series had to offer.
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