XIII Century: Blood of Europe – PC Review

Reviewed by Kieron Giacopazzi on March 3, 2010

XIII Century: Blood of Europe - PC Review  | read this item

It’s through no fault of it’s own that your first venture into XIII Century: Blood of Europe may lead you begin casting comparisons to another, far more well known and popular strategy gaming series, it’s looks alone are enough to cry foul of it’s seemingly copycat nature, and yet doing so isn’t just unfair it’s also completely off the mark. What initially looks like little more than another Total War clone soon turns into something completely different, a game that may make no apologies about borrowing a few things from Creative Assembly’s vast back catalogue of historical epics, but a game that’s vastly different in practically every other regard.

For starter’s, anyone expecting any kind of grand campaign mode will likely be disappointed by what’s on offer. There’s no turn based strategic map of it’s Medieval 13th Century Russian setting, no construction of bases or cities and no spying or subterfuge on neighbouring enemy territories. There isn’t either any castle sieging. All you get here is a multiplayer game with an extensive offline skirmish mode and a tiny 8 separate single player missions. To be fair however, those missions aren’t easily completed. Each provides a series of pretty daunting obstacles to overcome, often pitting you and a small band of units against armies that can, and often do, number twice to even ten times your size. Incentives to persevere is offered through the experience and money you gain from completing each mission, troops you loose in one battle will be lost for all subsequent engagements, while those who survive become more hardened and can have their abilities upgraded.

Victory doesn’t come easy though, and while it’s single player may only be short each mission can be a real challenge even to strategic veterans. The game punishes you for not taking the time to wait patiently before the start of each battle and just observing, making every effort to position your armies to the best of their abilities and relying on terrain to get the upper hand. While other games may let you get away with such concerns and allowing you to win by just marching the strongest units into the enemy, here such a gutsy move can lead to critical failure. Such a steep learning curve does make you appreciate just how detailed the information you are given about every single unit is.

Stat’s screen on each unit display everything from that particular units strength and the amount of troops that have either been killed or are currently wounded to just how weakly defended they are against an attack from a specific direction. These can prove invaluable tools that help make the decisions on where to place units to maximise their effectiveness. Formations also play a large role, and XIII offers up an extensive array of army formations that suit practically every situation. Learning how to best use these pieces of information isn’t something that’s optional either, such is the difficulty of each mission that a failure to learn how to properly prepare before the beginning of battles can make all the difference between a heroic victory or a crushing defeat.

The apposing AI also does a good job of twisting the knife once it’s plunged deep into your chest, and should you find yourself on the receiving end of a beating, the enemy armies rarely make it easy for you to fight back. It works best when it observes and waits for you to make a mistake, an exposed flank here or an undefended group of archers there, as soon as the enemy spots these holes in your defences he usually and without mercy pounces on them. The AI does a good job of making you work for that elusive victory, but it’s not entirely flawless. The impulsiveness of your own armies can sometimes be a source of constant frustrating, acting alone they often launch themselves in to an attack when an enemy gets too close and this can sometimes leave huge gaps into your defences that can leave you vulnerable. Moments like this don’t happen often enough to blight the rest of the game, but when they do occur they can draw your attention away from where it’s really needed.

Though perhaps not the most important feature, the game does at least look the part, at least if you observe the chaos from a distance. Up close thing get a bit ugly, character models are never that impressive and despite some attempt to try and add variety by giving each soldier individual looking faces and armour, far too often it looks as though you command an army or similar looking clones. It’s not a major fault though, such is the intensity of the battles and the need to be in full view of the battlefield to ensure the survival of your troops that you’ll very rarely feel the need to get in that close anyway. Sound effects and voice over work also manage to be a little unspectacular, with the rattling of swords and thwacking of arrows into flesh never quite creating that sense of full scale carnage you want to hear.

Whilst it would be easy to dismiss XIII outright for such foibles, it’d also be unfair. There is a good game in here, challenging, difficult and when it all goes right quite fulfilling but it remains a game that can only really be recommended to whose who already dabbled in the original XIII Century and are looking to continue where that game left off. Newcomers may find the steep learning curve too much to handle and will probably be better off seeking their medieval strategic thrills elsewhere. So while those initial comparisons may be unavoidable, XIII Century is forever overshadowed by the Total War games, and while it’ll never likely claw it’s way past, for those willing to put the time and effort in it can quite happily coexist.

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Tags: Excalibur Publishing, Historical, medieval, PC Review, Real time Strategy, RTS, Unicorn Games Studio, XIII Century, XIII Century: Blood of Europe