Genre: Real-Time Strategy

Reviewed on: Windows PC

Available for: PC

Publisher: SEGA

Developer: Creative Assembly

Rating: 16+(PEGI)

IT was men against boys. Well, it was musket-toting redcoats versus savages with sharp sticks in truth, but either way I won handsomely and it was great.

Such is the joy of Empire at War.

In classic European expansionist style, you take your highly trained modern army and flags and such to far off lands and pinch them for yourself.

This latest outing of the real time strategy king has taken the whole business of land grabbing to another, highly enjoyable level.

As you plot and scheme, slaughter and burn your way across Europe, the Americas or India, your burgeoning empire is now strung across farms and mines and forts and other outposts, each of which need too be managed and carefully guarded from the invasions of your many enemies. Plenty of whom will be better armed than you.

Ranged weapons not really present in Medieval Total War II, the forerunner in the series, radically changes the combat dynamic, with canon and musket making mincemeat of any foolhardy charge.

And, for the first time, the combat stretches out across the waves, with creaking men of war dancing a murderous ballet of ball and shot and brutal boarding parties.

Sloops and frigates and ships of the line gracefully edge around each other, delivering broadsides that send showers of wood scattering across the glistening water. It’s really quite beautiful.

In fact the whole game shines with a graphical finesse that, while welcome, will surely stretch all but the most tooled-up PC as, ant like beneath you, thousands of beautifully animated little troops set about the business of butchering one another en masse.

The lustre is knocked off a touch by developers’ Creative Assembly’s continuing failure to get a handle on the AI. Despite many attempts, the computer brain is still full of holes, with many frustrating idiocies making it through from as far back as Rome Total War unedited. The solution to this is undoubtedly online multi-player where you should find your Waterloo.

SCORE: 7 / 10