War & Peace Review (no fat)

Game Description

War & Peace is a real-time strategy game that combines both civilization management and warfare. As such, the game involves both building and expanding cities, and engaging in wars to increase your military power and rank. This complex game allows you to select one of six nations and freely explore the world. The game proposes eight historical campaigns, as well as two fictional ones. The ‘no-restriction’ counterparts obviously exist only to give War & Peace more replay value. This title also encourages you to rewrite history, by giving you the possibility to try any fictitious, implausible scenario.

War & Peace Gameplay

War & Peace takes place in the Napoleonic era, where ill-timed alliances and wars were plentiful. After selecting your nation, your first task is to develop it, both economically and militarily. In doing so, you build cities, and their necessary structures. Each structure has a purpose, and you subsequently need to build the appropriate ones, based on your current objective. Since a city can only support a limited number of buildings, achieving the right balance of the several types of infrastructure is crucial in your quest. The nation you choose is also a determining factor since the latter's characteristics often play a crucial role in your empire's foundations, and its diplomatic and warfare prowess.

Upon building your cities, you need to concentrate on your development and diplomacy level. Better research levels yield more resources, and conducting research is as easy as selecting an option from a menu. The system is exceedingly simple, since once you set a specific topic, it is automatically carried out. You can thus make your choice, and carry on building your cities while the research is being dutifully performed. As is the tradition in the genre, you can also form alliances with other nations, or invade others to increase your wealth. Striking key alliances is often a good way of ensuring victory in upcoming wars, and the diplomacy aspect certainly plays a preponderant role in War & Peace.

Battles thus frequently pop up, as you find yourself defending against an aggressive nation or taunting your neighbor with your skilled army. You have both ground and naval units, and these include the usual ones such as infantry and artillery. It is to be noted that each unit has its pros and cons, making the battles very demanding. War & Peace lays emphasis on battle formation and lineup, rather than quantity. In addition, the game maintains a good sense of realism, by severely handicapping you whenever you try to engage in too many wars at once. You should also be aware that it benefits from a remarkable A.I., where the opposing nations pose a real threat. The ability to build new structures while engaged in battle also makes War & Peace even more impressive.

Unfortunately, War & Peace has no multiplayer support, but given the plethora of missions and options available, this is not such a big drawback. The single-player mode alone gives the game a high replay value, as there's so much you can do. You can strike alliances with other nations, and eventually decide to invade them regardless of your agreements. You can also keep your nation isolated, as you seek to increase your wealth through your own resources. Moreover, War & Peace allows you to set your own objectives to complete the game. Although this feature has not been fully exploited since you cannot pin down overly specific ending requirements, it gives the game more replay value by not limiting you to the same routine task over and over again.

War & Peace Visuals

War & Peace is a 3D strategy game with well-designed cities and textures. Structures are accurately drawn, allowing you to recognize them with little effort. These structures, as well as the beautiful and varied locations, also benefit from an impressive color palette. Unfortunately, the same attention to detail does not exist as far as your units are concerned. Indeed, the latter are only in 2D, and look completely messed up. The animation is also of poor quality, especially during battles, but this does have the advantage of preventing any slow-down or lag.

A good interface is essential to make the game thoroughly enjoyable, and War & Peace never disappoints. Menus are laid out in a logical fashion, and you will never be confused since options are intuitively arranged. Information is also presented in an appropriate way without any cluttering, meaning you can always easily obtain the details you want. War & Peace additionally benefits from efficient menu designs that will not distract or annoy you. These blend in the game marvelously.

War & Peace Sound

The game benefits from fitting music that seamlessly blends with it's atmosphere. The sound effects while eventually monotonous, never getting annoying. The voice-acting is of exceptional quality, with voices that are a joy to the ear. In addition, the game goes to the extent of actually providing different languages, with respect to the proposed nations. In an unexpected twist, various accents exist per nation to make this game extremely impressive audio-wise.

To add an extra touch of flavor to this already tempting offer, the developers have taken care to add a feature which ensures that the volume of the sound effects and voiceovers is increased and decreased with respect to your zoom position. The closer you are the clearer the battle sounds would be.

War & Peace Overall

War & Peace is an interesting strategy game that boasts a couple of nice innovations such as the ability to set your own objective. There's no denying the game is deep and fun, with the multitude of facets you need to take into consideration while building your empire. While it would have challenged some of the top brokers in the RTS market if it had a multiplayer option to boast, it's a worthy addition to any war strategy buff’s game collection.

War & Peace Cost

War & Peace currently retails for $29.99.