Flamebait: Total SnoreBoreChore
Oh boy. I bet you played the Total War series, right? Right? I bet you thought it was per-retty fun. All those little men, moving around on <insert period transport here> and clashing <insert period-appropriate weapon here> on the <period terrain>. Gripping stuff. Like Ben Hur, but with the frame rate turned way down, directed by Al Gore and shot from fifteen hundred feet away.
Look, I like strategy games, okay? I like them because I get to think and then act. Think. Then act. The action comes after the thinking, which Total War manages to get from its first iteration – the Japanoriffic Shogun: Total War – but what it fails to grasp is that when I ask for things to happen, I expect to still be alive when they occur. I don’t expect to have to raise an heir on this side of the monitor in order to take the game on when I die of old age waiting for my cavalry to get into a flanking position.
How many strategies do I need exactly? Even Sun Tzu would think it was going a little over the top – there’s only two ways to go through a valley, the right way and the wrong way. The wrong way gets everyone killed, and on that basis 90% of Total War strategies are ‘the wrong way’. And no, I don’t accept that I’m merely rubbish at the game, as I was raised by hardened veterans, and most multiplayer training sessions involved swearing over Teamspeak and the AI laying the smack down on just about everyone in sight.
Of course, maybe that’s the beauty. Maybe that elusive 10% is what the game is all about, the meaty strategy hiding away in the massive pile of gristle, teeth-gnashing and completely unnecessary historical pomposity. Maybe it’s significant that there are four different kind of pikemen. Maybe I need to understand the tactical nuances of men on elephants and not just accept that, hey, they’re walking grey brick shithouses.
Because that’s what gets me most about Total War – the entire idea, from start to finish, is fun-sounding. Command huge armies! Fire flaming pigs at cities! Starve people! Fling people! Elephant people! The game series invents the verb to elephant for god’s sake. And yet, despite all of this, it’s really, really not very fun at all. It’s got fucking elephants. How can it not be fun?
Miraculously, it manages it. It manages it through a clever combination of statistics, randomness and horrible, crippling slowness. Even with a speed control, this game moves on at a snail’s pace. Cavalry units sweep majestically across massive tracts of grassy-browny-grass and then collide for five seconds with a group of another colour. Random numbers are generated. You lose.
Yeah, alright, I forgot that South Roman Purple Spearmen get a 19% pre-tax bonus against Men On Horses With Hats On. And yes, I foolishly bought the Level 3 Hats upgrade which adds go-faster stripes to the horses but also makse them weak versus water Pokémon. Yes. There were bad tactical decisions made. But with an infinite amount of them to make, it’s quite hard to make the better ones.
It’s that awful combination of slow build-up and very fast failure that not only makes it a polar opposite to the dizzying quality heights of Team Fortress 2 and Command And Conquer, but also trips up on so many Bad Design Rules that it’s a wonder any of you ever played it at all. You do realise that games are supposed to be fun? Fun? Yes?
That means that when elephants are told to attack something they trumpet the theme tune from The A-Team and throw men around as they shout racial slurs and dismember themselves. And when I tell troops to siege a city they put up banners with catchy insulting slogans and amusing political cartoons. And maybe ferrets. I don’t know, something FUN. Not horrific historical accuracy to the point of HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE BOREDOM.
GUYS... history is boring. It’s taught by people with goatees and using textbooks that have their own postal codes. It doesn’t need a game conversion, guys. It doesn’t need four of them, that’s for damn sure.
Now get back to tank rushes and shotguns, and if I see a single elephant in a game that isn’t wearing a cape, I’m getting out the trebuchets and laying siege to Creative Assembly.
