Aggression - Reign Over Europe
A game for Generals, Soldiers need not apply.
A common occurrence in video games is once you have a winning formula, just keep that formula and add on bits here and there to call it a new game. What Aggression – Reign Over Europe has done seems to have taken bits and parts from lots of different strategy games and added on to the ideas making a new, but complex product. This can be seen as a bad or good thing depending on what kind of gamer you are.
The first major aspect of the game is the map of Europe. The map of Europe is broken into several different territories separated by solid lines (like the board game RISK), each with the major city from that territory being present. All of the games most important political decisions are governed from this screen, which is too bad because the heads up display used to govern all these decisions, feels awkward at the best of times. There are several small buttons on the top and bottom bar that lead to many different menus the deal with everything from researching new technologies to keeping track of who you are at war with. In addition to these menus you must also micro manage your cities to keep them from revolting, manage your heroes to do each of their special hero duties and manage your armies. With the board game look, the amount of menus that must be navigated and your heroes’ micro managed, it really is a surprise they decided to go with a real time instead of turn based.
Heroes are probably the most interesting aspect to the map of Europe portion of the game. You can control several heroes each with the ability to choose up to 3 different professions with each profession having about 9 different skills. This leads to near limitless possibilities on what kind of hero combos you can have. You can even have a general that controls armies, whom is also a humanitarian. You can even make a scientist spy if you wished. The heroes are really a lot of fun and one of the best aspects of the overall game.
The second main aspect of the game is almost like a RTS mini game. While your units have a lot of different options such as going into prone, running and so on, the controls feel too clunky. A lot of times it feels like its left completely to chance on whether you win or lose. The battles look great however so it’s a bit like watching a movie as explosions blow everything up. After awhile though you may grow sick of this part of the game and end up auto calculating all the battles.
Visually the game is split. The Europe map isn’t too impressive, the small trees here and there and water rippling is about the best extent of the effects. These effects also feel somehow unnecessary though as it’s a bit like painting details on the board game RISK, it just distracts from an already tough to learn game. The battlefields are where the game tends to shine. There are buildings blowing up, explosions everywhere and the amount of units on the screen really feels like you are commanding a squad of units from above.
With all the great visual effects it’s too bad that Aggression didn’t have the audio to go along with it. Voice acting is not present at all which means in order to learn the game you have to read page after page of tutorial screens which becomes tedious quite quickly. The sounds effects don’t always feel timed right during battles and are somewhat dull and don’t add to the battles. The music is probably the best of all the sound as it fits in the background nicely without distracting from the core game play.
The single player begins with a tutorial that feels a bit like a classroom setting; first you read what to do, then do it, repeat. Taking in all this information is confusing as the game has a lot of aspects to keep track of and learning them all in one load of information is extremely hard at best. After you get through the tutorial you begin campaign mode which doesn’t give you much direction when you start out other than “Go at it”, which might be fine if continental conquest is your thing. Lastly there are missions which add a bit to the play time of this game but aren’t always that much fun as sometimes it feels like its based heavily off of chance.
It’s too bad that no multiplayer was added to this game as after you finally start to get into it the game is over and there is nothing left to do but put this game back on the shelf. It really would have been great to add multiplayer as really this genre of game lends itself heavily to it. Nothing is better than arguing with buddies over who to invade and using “real politics” as you play the game. It feels like a huge chunk of the game is missing by not bringing this to the table.
Aggression – Reign over Europe definitely isn’t for everybody. The long learning curve, complex strategy aspects and single player only means that this is likely a game that only a hardcore strategy gamer would love. While the game had some great ideas, the execution feels like it missed and did not make this game as accessible to everyone as it could have been.
