Napoleon's Campaigns

There’s nothing wrong with historical accuracy, and don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise. It is a virtuous thing to create a game (or film, or book for that matter) that even an historian couldn’t fault. Not only that, but I’d also imagine it to be laborious, frustrating and difficult.

Nevertheless, Nobilis have achieved this admirably with their latest turn-based strategy offering. Napoleon’s Campaigns allows you to lead the mightiest armies in Europe across the blood-soaked years between 1805 and 1815; the decade which saw both the diminutive dictator’s meteoric ascent to the historical stratosphere and his catastrophic slide into island-based oblivion.

The armies of the period are recreated with a level of detail which at the very least qualifies as obsessive. Armies, corps, divisions and brigades are yours to form, disband, reorganise and command. They are even made up of the very regiments that existed at the time.

And, lest ye worry, the detail does not stop there! Each of these units will be led by a general, and these are genuine historical characters whose attributes and abilities are faithfully recreated. It actually matters which general you send to fight a battle, and your choice will heavily influence the result.

In a shameless display of geekish solidarity, I shall admit to finding this kind of compulsive, forensic accuracy highly impressive (Ed - have you finished all the books on Oblivion yet?). The sheer effort that it must have taken to get all these details right is worthy of awe, and if accuracy is what you want from a game then you can’t go far wrong with Napoleon’s Campaigns.

Unfortunately though, many gamers are probably not going to care about accuracy, and this is where the game begins to stumble a little. There’s plenty of decent gameplay in Napoleon’s Campaigns, but finding it, buried whimpering as it is under endless reams of unit stats, can be nigh on impossible.

Impenetrable is an inadequate description when you discover the sheer enormity of the challenge facing the new player. This challenge is not from the enemy armies you need to defeat, but from even understanding how to make the game function at its most basic level.

The tutorials sketch out the barest bones of the gameplay and refer you to the manual for a more in-depth understanding of what’s going on. The drawback of this approach is that reading the manual is an experience about as enjoyable as an exploding barbed-wire cage match.

Most of us don’t enjoy reading any kind of manual at the best of times, and in this case the incredible intricacy of the game makes the endeavour all the more baffling. You emerge from the weighty tome confused (Ed - Try reading an old school flight sim manual for genuine heftiness), a little numb and still lacking any real comprehension of how to proceed. However, without the manual you have even less chance of ever understanding the game, so it’s a bit of a catch-22, I’m afraid.

After the tutorials are over, you could be forgiven for hoping to ease your way gently into the game proper. As you struggle to absorb the basic concepts, it would be nice to think that there were a couple of small, straightforward scenarios where you could begin to find your feet.

If these exist, I couldn’t find them. Whichever scenario you select, it will throw you in the deep end with lead weights securely fastened to your ankles. You are thrust immediately into the conflict with little idea of what resources you control, how to use them, and what you’re meant to be achieving anyway. When I finally got a (tenuous) grip on the situation and headed off to fight, I made another irritating discovery.

Battles, or more accurately the lack thereof, did niggle a little. The DVD case promised that in playing the game I could “at last experience every detail of the famous battles.” This is not strictly true. You can experience every aspect of the campaigns that surround the battles, but the fighting itself is all resolved automatically.

I was a tad disappointed that, instead of leading your men gloriously into combat, you are merely presented with a message informing you of your victory or defeat and accompanied by yet more impenetrable statistics. There is nothing wrong with games that don’t allow you to control the action directly, but I thought it was a touch disingenuous to have suggested that this game did.

Ultimately it is entirely possible to get over all of these niggles. Unfortunately, the game seems to go out of its way to make this as difficult as possible. This is a terrible shame, as there’s a damn good game hidden in there. It has clearly had time and effort lavished freely upon it, but it will inevitably suffer simply because it feels so unwelcoming.

A deep, intelligent and interesting game, Napoleon’s Campaigns will reward those willing to devote weeks or months to learning its intricacies. If you are a hardcore strategy fan, or if you enjoy the thought of wading through the sometimes baffling level of detail, then this game is truly hard to fault. However, if your clammy, fearful hands tremble at the thought of the immense effort this would involve, then unfortunately the game may not be for you.

6/10

Steven Rees