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Great Invasions - The Dark Ages '350 - 1066 AD'
Home : Games : Reviews : PC / Windows : Great Invasions - The Dark Ages '350 - 1066 AD'
Once I navigated my way past the landmines in the tutorial, I started to get a better grasp of how to play. Unlike most strategy games I’ve played, starting small is not the best option; while there are a few built-in scenarios where you’ll start with only a handful of provinces to control, the unusual pacing of the real time system means that having more areas to play with means less waiting around for your units to move from province to province, or for structures to finish building at their own maddeningly slow pace. Given how little graphic representation there is this game (more on that below), the real time system is a huge drag; my guess is that the designers included it to make multiplayer games more fun, but a turn-based system would have been much more time effective.
In addition to the above problems, Great Invasions may have the most poorly thought-out interface I’ve seen on a game in years. Sloppy mouse controls, tool tips with grammatical errors and odd quirks like not being able to load a saved game from the game startup menu or return to that startup menu from within the game make for a maddening, unnecessarily complicated playing experience.
Home : Games : Reviews : PC / Windows : Great Invasions - The Dark Ages '350 - 1066 AD'
Game Play
After getting a grasp of Great Invasion’s subtle game mechanics by reading through the manual, I started playing through the game’s version of a tutorial. Most games in this day and age, especially one this complicated, would have opted for an on-screen guided tutorial. Great Invasion’s tutorial, on the other hand, is three pages in a manual and an associated scenario that don’t always match up – it took me four tries and a trip to the message board to find out the reason why the game wasn’t acting like the documentation said it should. 
Diplomatic exchanges, like offers of trade, take place through dialog screens that appear above the game board.
Once I navigated my way past the landmines in the tutorial, I started to get a better grasp of how to play. Unlike most strategy games I’ve played, starting small is not the best option; while there are a few built-in scenarios where you’ll start with only a handful of provinces to control, the unusual pacing of the real time system means that having more areas to play with means less waiting around for your units to move from province to province, or for structures to finish building at their own maddeningly slow pace. Given how little graphic representation there is this game (more on that below), the real time system is a huge drag; my guess is that the designers included it to make multiplayer games more fun, but a turn-based system would have been much more time effective.
In addition to the above problems, Great Invasions may have the most poorly thought-out interface I’ve seen on a game in years. Sloppy mouse controls, tool tips with grammatical errors and odd quirks like not being able to load a saved game from the game startup menu or return to that startup menu from within the game make for a maddening, unnecessarily complicated playing experience.
The game board uses a number of color schemes to illustrate different pieces of information about each province.
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