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This was me, yelling at my PC screen at the end of a battle that, as you may be able to tell, hadn't gone well. At a crucial point in a massive battle, my infantry had lost its nerve and turned tail. My archers were exposed. My cavalry was, regrettably, already spent. I was doomed and pretty ticked off.
This is the core of Total War: Attila, which delivers a very real emotional attachment to unfolding and fast-moving top-down battles between a dozen-or-so formations of military units. I had lined up spearmen, archers, lancers and axemen against a fairly evenly matched foe. We had gone toe-to-toe and I'd been out-thought and out-fought by the AI. The is 15 years old, a venerable age for a still-experimental franchise that seeks to merge real-time and turn-based strategy gaming. In 2013, developer Creative Assembly launched, a major revamp that, unfortunately, came with significant technical issues and took a while to fix. The game has been tweaked in the intervening years and those improvements have helped shape Total War: Attila, which offers narrative and visual upgrades along with additional systemic annexes at the margins.
Total War: Attila is a safe and steady entry that seeks to complete the Rome trilogy with a focusing on the fall of that empire. With it, Creative Assembly has captured the thrill of real-time battles, while piling on a cumbersome, but still convincingly wrought overworld of late Roman political intrigue and economics. In Total War: Attila, the player can choose from a wide selection of tribes, including Romans and The Huns, and try to survive and profit from a near global collapse of order. Each tribe represents different campaigns that offer their own challenges and advantages. New additions in this entry include the ability for horde tribes to survive on the road, without a static base. This is a nod to the incredibly fluid movement of peoples at that time, by choice or due to displacement because of military defeat, climate change, famine and disease, often all at once.
In the battle scenes, you face an enemy in real time, directing units and reacting to events. These are the center of the experience, though there is a much wider game on offer here.
Surrounding the action section of the game is a host of systems that augment the fantasy of running a proto-Dark Age society. Of course, there are strategy standards like researching technologies, upgrading city buildings and building military units. There are also political ideas at play, in which you — the king — surround yourself with a network of men and their wives (this is an almost entirely patriarchal society) who will do your bidding effectively. A map-world must also be managed, on which armies are moved about to best serve the society's military requirements.
Trouble comes in the form of plagues, bad weather, marauding warbands, court intrigues and diplomatic crises with neighbors. On the whole, your job in this turn-based mode is to keep an eye on the game's systems to make sure everything is in order and to choose between trade-offs when options are presented. For example, shall I allow this ambitious and competent subject of mine to grab a position of power without my permission, or shall I turn a blind eye and take a small hit on my power-rating for a short while? Everything is underpinned by a vast stats system that confers benefits and restrictions.
If I lose power, I have less authority to control my court. If I annoy someone, I face the prospect of a larger confrontation that might cost me more power. It is an admirable attempt to garnish the wargaming part of the experience with a sense of political realism and, on the whole, it works. Action or inaction convert into stats that themselves convert into power and ability. While the management of all these systems can feel chore-like, such as endlessly upgrading characters, the whole comes across as a pretty convincing simulation of what it must have been like to run, say, the Visigoths, circa 400 AD. Necessarily, this is all presented via a monumental superstructure of menus and screens, which takes a while to master. Even after many hours of play, I am not sure I fully understand the byzantine intricacies of managing my court and family, presented as an endless array of men-who-look-the same with funny-sounding names.
Creative Assembly has worked to simplify its menus, but they remain complicated and, sometimes, downright baffling. There's also the issue of wait-times between turns, as rival stats and movements are calculated. Those waits aren't game-breakingly bad, but they are an irritant. Individually, much of the turn-based activity feels at the margins.
But in total, all this activity makes an enormous difference, especially in late game, when upgrades and the competence of your generals, carefully managed over several decades, can tip the scales between a disastrous defeat and a victory that will justify the player's entire campaign strategy. Total War: Attila is challenging, even at low levels of difficulty.
Neighbors are always in a high dudgeon, agitated and fearful. Borders are disrespected. Raiding armies are a regular occurrence. If you are the sort of strategy player who enjoys steadily increasing your borders while empowering your people with ever greater levels of happiness and wealth, you're in for a nasty surprise. The game's economy is measured to ensure that it is nigh on impossible to defend all cities at the same time, with anything other than token arms. Taking a large band of armies in one direction in order to conquer new lands is to almost guarantee incursions from the other direction. Movement of armies in the overworld game map is a matter of careful calculation.
A moment of carelessness can be catastrophic. Playing as a large empire is a nightmare. Playing as a small one is hard graft. Playing as a horde takes patience and skill. This, in case I am not being clear, is a difficult game. In short, it is a realistic simulation of a world in a state of constant war and strife.
Total War: Attila can only really be mastered by careful marshaling of all resources, and by managing money, cities and armies as tenderly as possible. It is possible, easy actually, to generate armies and throw them endlessly into battles, but the trick, the stark beauty of this game, is in caring for your armies and your generals, so that they become more seasoned, competent and trustworthy. This is what makes the overall management of each society so challenging.
It's not so much about territory as it is about manpower and, dare I say it, brotherhood. The poetry and songs of early medieval civilizations linger on the deeds and sacrifices of fellow fighters and great leaders.
Total War: Attila celebrates this cultural imperative in an age of cruelty and barbarity. And so we return to the actual business of fighting battles. This is Total War at its absolute best, offering a multitude of tactical options and strategies. In this game, soldiers will turn and run when they feel like it's in their absolute best interest. In the massive battle I spoke of before, I must sit and watch as my battle strategies, and my armies, crumble. I was angry at my little men, milling around on the field in a state of panic, but the fact of the matter is that I had failed to prepare them correctly; I had failed to make proper use of the terrain; I had failed to react to the AI's own errors.
Now, here I was, behaving like an actual marauding Dark Age warlord, screaming at the dead, kicking corpses that they might rise and fight for me once more. As I played more and more battles I gained competence in flanking and maneuvering, tricking the enemy and making the best of terrain.
I learned to win, even when outnumbered. I figured out the trick of turning up with well-trained, spirited soldiers who supported each other with complementary skills. During battles, it's possible to zoom about the field, looking at everything taking place in fine detail, or from the highest perspective. There is a special pleasure to be had in zooming the camera right down into the detail of the battle, to watch the hundreds of soldiers going at it. In pure video gamey terms, Total War: Attila is an impressive piece of work. Wrap Up: Attila is a satisfying simulation of a world in chaos Another battle sticks in the mind.
I was outnumbered two-to-one. I used terrain to find distance and tire my opponent. My horses whittled away at the enemy, teasing units away from the horde and cutting them down, while my infantry stood firm on a wooded hilltop, archers raining arrows down on enemies. Sheer numbers demanded that my units fell one by one. A lone squadron of archers was all that was left. I waited for defeat. Those archers, nurtured over many game turns, fought until the end.
The enemy's last squadrons, exhausted, dropped arms and retreated. It was miraculous and beautiful.
I shouted for joy. 'You beauties. You gorgeous, lovely, wonderful little beauties.' Total War: Attila is challenging, complex and often frustrating but it's also a satisfying simulation of life in a world of unfolding chaos and constant violence. Total War: Attila was reviewed using a pre-release 'retail' Steam download code provided by Sega. You can find additional information about Polygon's ethics policy.
Attila the Hun was a badass of the highest order. What else can you say about a man who conquered an empire that stretched from Kazakhstan to Germany? Pressure from the Hunnic invasions forced the Franks into France, the Angles into England, and led to the first sacking of Rome in more than 800 years. So if you’re going to create a game centered on a mighty warrior of late antiquity. There’s really only one option, isn’t there?
In the tradition of its forefathers, Total War: Attila mixes a turn-based strategic campaign with thrilling real-time tactical battles. It’s been a winning formula for nearly 15 years, but in this latest installment, Creative Assembly adds a few wrinkles that create one of the better Total War campaigns in recent memory. The most intriguing change rehashes an idea from an expansion to the original Rome: Total War - barbarian cultures can abandon their settlements to form nomadic hordes.
In horde mode, armies become mobile towns, gaining the ability to recruit troops on hostile ground at the cost of economic security. Converting your settlements into hordes is a great option if you’re fighting a losing war and need to find greener pastures, but without careful management hordes are likely to splinter into rebellions. Another addition seems yanked straight out of Crusader Kings 2: a heavy emphasis on political machinations. With Total War: Attila, Creative Assembly offers what is probably the most robust political system in any Total War yet.
Individual characters develop over time, and while all share an identical progression tree, each is also given a set of unique personality traits, such as mercantile contacts or bonus morale when in command of an attacking army. Managing these different characters is surprisingly enjoyable, but your leader must strike a balance when intervening in politics - meddle too much, you’ll find yourself with no political influence; leave your underlings to their own devices and they spark a rebellion. The political system can add quite a lot of fun to a game, which is why it’s a damn shame that the interface leaves something to be desired. Creative Assembly doesn’t go out of its way to teach the system to new players, and the interface often leaves out crucial information, meaning players are going to flounder for the first few hours. I got the hang of it eventually, but only after my inept leadership sparked two civil wars. Though there are several dozen unique factions in the game, a fairly small selection are available to the player without paying for DLC. Each have their own benefits and advantages, so choose your army wisely at the start of the game.
Huns, for example, have fearsome cavalry and a strong morale bonus when fighting christians. Saxons, meanwhile, gain bonus income for pillaging and damaging settlements. The rest of the strategic gameplay is about what you’d expect from a Total War game: satisfying, but nowhere near as tight or well balanced as a ‘real’ 4X title like Civilization 5. To give credit where it’s due, it does look like Creative Assembly has put some work into the AI, meaning computer controlled enemies attack with large armies instead of letting you chop them up piecemeal. Diplomatic AI seems improved as well, with clans suing for peace, negotiating trade agreements, and even marshalling armies to defend their allies’ settlements (something I’ve never seen in a Total War game before). AI has been a rough spot for previous Total War games (looking at you, Empire), and Attila seems like a real improvement.
As enjoyable as the new content and AI are, there are two big issues with Attila’s campaign that need to be mentioned. First, the review build is buggy as hell. At least once an hour, I’d end up staring at a locked screen with no option but giving my PC the three-fingered salute.
Second, the turn times are excruciating. I’ve spent as much as three or four minutes watching the AI turn rotate through the long list of clan badges. The average was closer to 2 minutes, but that still feels like an eternity - especially when you’re not sure whether the game will crash before you get to play again. Thankfully, both of these issues are problems that Creative Assembly has traditionally fixed post-launch. If strategic gameplay is serviceable, the tactical battles are outstanding. Battle speed has been ratcheted back, meaning units no longer break after a few seconds of combat. This is crucial, because it gives commanders enough time to experiment with special abilities or move units into flanking positions.
The UI has also received an extensive overhaul, and the new look is a solid compromise between form and function. The changes are far too numerous to list here, but the return of proper unit portraits will delight anyone unhappy with Rome 2’s stylish-but-confusing pottery-art unit cards. It’s actually fairly difficult to find major problems with the tactical battles, except to point out that the review build was just a bit unbalanced. Higher level units never felt much better than their cheaper counterparts, and you’ll find that the rock-paper-scissors of spearmen-swordsmen-cavalry trumps any individual unit’s strength.
If strategic gameplay is serviceable, the tactical battles are outstanding. Battle speed has been ratcheted back, meaning units no longer break after a few seconds of combat.
This is crucial, because it gives commanders enough time to experiment with special abilities or move units into flanking positions. The UI has also received an extensive overhaul, and the new look is a solid compromise between form and function. The changes are far too numerous to list here, but the return of proper unit portraits will delight anyone unhappy with Rome 2’s stylish-but-confusing pottery-art unit cards. It’s actually fairly difficult to find major problems with the tactical battles, except to point out that the review build was just a bit unbalanced. Higher level units never felt much better than their cheaper counterparts, and you’ll find that the rock-paper-scissors of spearmen-swordsmen-cavalry trumps any individual unit’s strength. Normally this is where I’d mention the graphics, but lets be honest: this is a Total War game - the graphics are spectacular if you’ve got a PC that can handle the higher settings.
So let’s talk about the brilliant audio design instead. There are many wonderful little touches- a general giving a pre-battle speech, unit actions being signalled by horn blasts - but its the music that really strikes home. Each culture-group has it’s own soundtrack, and each is tailored to that culture’s traditions - germanic factions hear drumming and chanting while steppe cultures are treated to the morin khuur (a type of fiddle) and throat singing.
It’s all fantastic, mixing just the right amounts of mystery and aggression to become one of the few game soundtracks I plan to listen to in my spare time. Of course, the voice acting is terrible, but that’s practically a Total War tradition, so I won’t hold it against Attila. Now then, let’s finally address the war elephant in the room: Is Attila better than Rome 2 was at launch? In fact, many of the additions to Attila seem to be direct responses to the Rome 2 backlash.
The AI is smarter. The UI is better. Battles are slow enough that an active commander has time to try effective flanking or misdirection tactics. The list could go on and on, but here’s the thing: Total War: Attila is a damn fine strategy game in its own right, without having to compare it to its oft-lamented predecessor. 4 out of 5 Total War: Attila By combining an improved UI with deeper strategic gameplay, Total War: Attila increments on Creative Assembly’s formula to deliver a strategy game (almost) worthy of its namesake. More Info Genre Real-Time Strategy Description The latest standalone installment in the superb Total War series sees you taking control of armies in the era of Attila the Hun.
Franchise name Total War UK franchise name Total War Platform PC Release date 17 February 2015 (US), 17 February 2015 (UK).