In a moment of weakness, I decided that my next big game after finishing Far Cry 2 would be Empire: Total War. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve loved the Total War series ever since the first Medieval and I’m the guy who’d once wrote that I’d buy Total War set in just about any genre. Still, I have to admit that I start way more Total War campaigns than I actually get around to finishing and the standard formula might just be wearing a bit too thin for me. Plus, there’s the fact that the initial releases have always been buggy messes. I knew there was a good reason why I waited for the Gold Edition before buying Medieval 2.

Empire turned out to be far more of a mess than any of the previous releases. I’d had intermittent sound problems, multiple crashes to the desktop within a single play session and even out of memory errors. Some folks have reported corrupted savegames and campaigns that had to be abandoned due to irrecoverable crashes. Granted, the 30 March patch seems to have fixed most of these technical problems, but my first impressions have been irredeemably soured by all this.

Partly due to all the crashes, I’m still playing the “tutorial campaign” called the Road to Independence in which the player guides a fledgling America towards indepedence from the British Empire. One thing that has to be said is that the game is gorgeous. The naval battle portion in particular features ships so richly detailed it’s silly, because you’re unlikely to actually go in for such close-up views more than a handful of times. The strategic portion has been significantly revamped, apparently to make it play more like the Civilization games, a change that I have mixed feelings about and will go into more detail about later. As for the land battles, while it’s cool to see ranks of infantry firing guns at each other and seeing just how far your artillery can hit, the fact that all infantry can now fire missile weapons makes all of the factions a bit too similar to one another.

Anyway, I’m well on my way towards clearing the Brits out of North America completely and then we’ll see how much I like the real meat of the game, the Grand Campaign. Now, which nation should I play first?