Napoleon's Campaigns
Review
Could you do better than Napoleon?
by Marko Susimetsä
reviewed on PC
Crash course on geography
Right from the start, meaning the tutorials themselves, you will realise that in order to properly play the game, you will have to learn the geography of all the areas where you will be fighting your (or Napoleon's) battles. Already the tutorial tells you to take this troop from here and move it there and you will spend a while wondering what and where the regions mentioned might be. Given the restricted view of the game map that you see when zoomed in enough to actually read the city and region names, you may easily get lost on the map. Thus, you may have to scroll around to see at least one familiar place name or such to tell you what area you are looking at and where your main forces are in relation to it. I would have liked to have the main cities, at least, marked with larger font even when the map is zoomed out – that would have helped a lot with the navigation. This is actually one of those games that you play and think that you really should stretch for a BIG screen monitor (assuming that you'd see more of the map with one).
Simultaneous move execution and battles
This is a feature also familiar from past AGEOD games, but it is very much worth mentioning here as well. Unlike in most turn-based strategy games, you will not be deciding your troop movements and then observing the troop movements of your enemy. Rather, both sides will decide their troop movements simultaneously and these decisions will be executed at the same time at the end of the turn, each turn representing a week of game time. The program will then see what sorts of interactions will occur between enemy forces, if their movements bring them to the same area on the map.
This also brings us to the major point in the game: the battles. Whenever your unit encounters an enemy unit, a battle will ensue. The outcome of this battle is dependent on the relative strengths of the encountering units and these strengths are the complement of several factors that leave a first-time gamer quite dumbfounded. Therefore, mastering this kind of a strategy game takes devotion and meticulous attention to detail. But no one ever said that Napoleon's job was easy. Rather, playing these sorts of games makes you appreciate even more what great generals were able to do on the battlefields. After a battle, you get an information sheet that tells you how both sides of the battle fared in the conflict and what sorts of damage they suffered.
The complexity of planning the best approaches in Napoleon's Campaigns is perhaps best encapsulated by this quote from Napoleon himself: “There are only two types of campaign plans: good ones and bad ones. The good ones almost always fail due to the same unforeseen circumstances that often make the bad ones succeed.”
Background music
There aren't that many sound effects in the game and, in fact, you can be surprised rather badly when you suddenly hear music from your headphones after a long stretch of silence. The background music consists of various pieces of period military music that seems to be triggered without any clear reason at all. This has been a complaint with previous AGEOD games as well, but it clearly hasn't been fixed yet. It would be far better to just pick a selection of good music from the period and play them in the background continuously (or let the player pick the ones (s)he likes to listen to) rather than play one song every now and then with long silences in between them. I'm pretty sure Napoleon enjoyed all sorts of music in his time – not just military bands – and might easily have been listening to certain classical masterpieces while devising his strategies.
Multiplayer
AGEOD has taken heed from feedback since their previous game. In addition to traditional hotseat and play-by-email games, you can now finally face off your best friend over LAN or Internet as well. Thus, even if you get bored with the AI as an enemy, and prefer your victims to have hot blood in their veins, you can extend the lifetime of this game by taking advantage of all the new ways of thinking and strategies that living opponents will try.
Overall
Napoleon's Campaigns, like all other AGEOD games, is clearly not meant for the casual gamers. In fact, the majority of gamers may be taken aback by the lack of action and the numerous pages full of statistics and battle reports that this kind of a hardcore strategy game will cater to you. Rather, Napoleon's Campaigns will be enjoyed by those gamers who are enthusiastic about historical battles and really want to relive and re-plan those battles again and again – finally getting an answer to all those bothersome “What if...?” questions, the biggest one of them being: “What if Napoleon had been able to fulfil his dream and moved on to conquer England?”
8.0
fun score
No Pros and Cons at this time
