It doesn't surprise me that another Total War game is a disaster at release time - I hope they'll fix the worst issues over the next year, and I'll take a look at it then. But are these reviews intentional ad-driven dishonesty or just pure incompetence?
I thought this game was gonna fail to surpass Rome 1 despite hoping it would. Looks like Lusted has failed to earn his wage.
Pro reviews are useful I think but I just glance at the scores now and search the article for the bits im interested in. Then ill do a quick comparison of different reviews and watch a video or two. Reviews are highly subjective anyway.
Empire in my experience was and is broken. I bought the game and it crashes randomly. Theyve patched it but it still crashes randomly, more so in an old advanced game. I suspect the extra bloat in empire and the map have pushed it to the edges of 32 bit memory addressing, which is hwy the next games were smaller than empire, ie napoleon, which i also bought and does not randomly crash, but is literally half the game that empire is. Followed by shogun again a smaller map. The unhappy trend is cointinuing for increased bloat that doesnt add much to the game. I think this trend reached its highest point in medieval 2, which is still my favourite TW game (closely followed by rome, its tough to call between these two), and has been negatively impacting TW since.My brother and I tried empire on multiple different computers at various times with all available official patches applied and we have never found the game to be stable in an advanced game with lots of units.
So I dont think empire deserves 90, I dont think it should be allowed to be sold. And if what im saying is true and not total rubbish a review shouldnt award a good score in spite of fundamental flaws, a score should reflect the quality and finish of the item being purchased.
I hated the sound of the new provinces and building controls in Rome 2. A review I read said that it all feels very random and unresponsive now. Sounds like itll make the empire model look good and I hated that when I first laid hands on it. I also think the empire model was again forced by memory limits, with 90 percent of france being 1 territory as an example of where I think they tried to save regions/memory/bloat.
Dave Dines: I only recently tried Napoleon, and I'm going to wait at least half a year (and most likely more) before I give Rome 2 a serious try. Hopefully by then it will be a much better game.
I still like Medieval 2 most of all Total War games.