Most pleasantly, the game sticks with the improved building UI from Rome II, which isn’t terribly surprising but is very welcome given the sometimes confusing maze of buildings from earlier games in the series.Īttila really shines in the way it matches its mechanics to the historical situation in Europe and the Middle East at the time it presents. Newcomers should be able to grasp the basics quickly, while old hands will pick it up comfortably. Everything is still “move on big board/fight on small board” as it has been for years.

Attila tinkers very little with the basic Total War formula, other than making the tech trees for the factions more robust. The basics are the same as the others in the series, so there’s not much to say. Attila isn’t the best entry in the series’ history, but it’s done quite a bit to claw back Total War’s reputation for me. Thankfully that was mostly without merit. Since Attila is essentially the same game as Rome II, only set during the Migration Period which preceded the fall of Rome, I was more than a bit trepidatious. And then poor Rome II was hobbled by strange performance issues and AI flubs which took a free expansion/revamp a year after release to fix. Napoleon was too limited in scope, Shogun II too simple. Empire had to contend with crippling bugs. The past few entries in the series have been, to put it nicely, a bit of a letdown. Speaking only for myself, it comes with added pressure to succeed. Total War: Attila is, for better or worse, a Total War game. When a battle between armies takes place, the real time layer takes over and you actually play out the battle. You build armies and research tech on a turn based map. Creative Assembly has a blueprint stretching back over a decade and they’re going to keep building with it, come hell or high water.īriefly, for the few who are still uninitiated, the Total War games wed zoomed out grand strategy a la Civilization with zoomed in real time strategy battles.

This isn’t Paradox, reinventing game maps and core systems, or Firaxis, switching to hexes and eliminating stacking. It’s just that a Total War game simply doesn’t change a whole lot between entries. This isn’t brought up to be snarky about Total War, the folks who review the games, or (certainly) myself. Even reviewers have to acknowledge that each new entry is much the same as the last in structure and art style, just as they did with the one before that and the one before that. Indeed, looking over reviews of past Total War games meant reading intros that are markedly similar to what I just wrote. Its creators, Creative Assembly, have a vision of what they want and they deviate from it rarely, if ever. By this point, the Total War series is so woven into the fabric of PC gaming that it hardly needs explanation of its take on grand strategy.

Total war attila western roman empire