The air was filled with smoke and blood. Total War Attila presented itself to be reviewed by iLL Gaming. It had brought with it a gift of four Horses, White, Red Black and Ashen, for they were the harbingers of the Apocalypse it promised. The fight was fierce and brutal and its chronicles follow this line.
Total War Attila is Creative Assembly’s second title named after a historical figure. Unlike Napoleon Total War though, it does not have a dedicated campaign that follows the exploits of Attila the Hun, though it does manage to convey his story through cutscenes. Also, you do get to control Attila when playing as the Huns or fight him eventually when playing as the other factions. At its core, the game is a modification on the base gameplay seen in Total War Rome II. While Rome II suffered from performance issues at launch, Attila seems to have benefited from the performance fixes over the course of the last year and a half. The performance of our Review copy was quite stable, and the same holds true for retail copies.
The Prologue of Total War Attila tells the story of the migration of the Visigoths, culminating in the battle of Adrianople in which the Eastern Roman Emperor Valens was slain on the field. It explains all the basics of the game as well as introducing some new changes to the gameplay. Curiously, the prologue scripting is rather buggy with some mission prompts not showing up while other missions are shown as completed despite that not being the case. A mission asks you to recruit agents despite your empire not having the necessary building for the same. It took us five attempts to finally see the prologue through to completion, and even then, we weren’t able to complete all the issued missions.
The new elements that Total War Attila brings to the gameplay include Nomadic armies and Migration. Smaller factions like the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals and Alans start out as nomadic armies that can capture a settlement in order to settle and lay the foundations of an empire. They can also start a migration that destroys all the settlements under their control and changes their armies into migratory armies. The Huns always remain a migratory army. A migratory army has its own structures that perform the same functions as those in a settlement. In order to use these structures, the army must transition into its encamped state, which restricts its movement range.
The addition of these nomadic armies adds a certain dynamism to the campaign map. Total War Attila sees a lot more field battles thanks to this mechanic. The tutorial for playing as one of these armies is rather short and it will take a few failed campaigns to get to grips with playing as one. Migration is handicapped in terms of income since it is solely dependent on taxes and raiding. Migratory armies cannot make trade agreements, nor can they field navies, though they can move troops across water.
While playing as a ravaging horde may seem exciting, those looking for a different kind of challenge can try playing as one of the established Empires. These can provide a different kind of challenge, as they are overstretched and teetering on the brink of self-destruction. It is up to the player to take a few wise steps back to be able to rebuild the former empire in all its glory. Contrary to what one might think about the difficulty of playing as a horde, it is the Empire campaigns that have the greatest difficulty in the starting phase.
The Family Tree has become a game in itself with its currency of influence that determines your hold over your empire. Politics can prove a nice distraction from the battles and campaign map movements. You can perform a variety of actions with various figures in your dynasty and empire such as securing loyalty, embezzling funds, promoting your own man to office, divorcing a spouse or seeking a suitable partner. Your family members can have both legitimate and illegitimate offspring. As was the practice in the times, the male members of your family can be promoted to administrative posts like Province Governor or as the commander of your Army or Fleet. The Daughters are used a bargaining chip in negotiations with other powers or can be married off to one of your own men. You can also adopt another noble into the royal family. One needs to keep a watch on the loyalties of various members of your court as well as your ruling family’s influence so as to avoid any rebellion. This sort of political gameplay adds a role-playing dimension to Total War Attila.
The advantage of having multiple claimants to the various roles in your empire is that you can now specialise them either as governors or as generals. It is beneficial to have them promote their own men into office since this can grant them certain bonuses to their task. The flip side of this is that their personal clout also increases, which can cause political trouble for you. The great thing that Total war Attila achieves with this system is the delicate balance of reward and repercussions that must be managed as a metagame, while also trying to survive and persevere.
The campaign map has each turn lasting a season. Every season in Total War Attila has its own repercussions on the lands you own, which includes their fertility and the amount of food they produce per turn. Each province is dependent on its own food production, so despite your empire having an overall food surplus, some provinces may suffer from famine. The game simulates the mini Ice Age that set in during this time historically by having harsher winters as the game progresses. This causes a drop in food production and the fertility of land, which forces migration from the affected regions. Population growth also takes a beating in these conditions. The failing of this harsher winter occurs when the warmer regions south of the Mediterranean also begin losing fertility. Visually the campaign map wears a distinctive look in each season and winter usually applies attrition penalties to armies in the open if they are moving through snowy regions.
The UI in Total War Attila has been revamped from the artistically stylised designs of Rome II to more simplistic representations of units in battle with tiny squares indicating their weaponry. This does not indicate whether it is a light or heavy unit however, so you are left to check the unit portraits to determine that. Mousing over does bring up an information window but such details can be easily missed in the heat of battle. Situations can occur where you send a light counter unit against the enemy’s heavy unit and find little success in the move. Unit portraits make a return in Total War Attila with every card showing an image of a rendered unit model. The minimap has been moved to the top right corner and it shows the true line of sight of your units in battle. The campaign UI hasn’t changed much from Rome II other than the representation of armies using a wreath around the circular faction symbol. This system is utterly confusing for gauging the strength of a stack, as you can’t easily make out how many unit it contains. The Tech tree UI has been streamlined however, and is certainly an improvement on what we got in Rome II, since you now have proper paths to your upgrades and they are neatly divides as military and economic technologies.
Any garrison, army or fleet in Total War Attila has an area of influence depicted by a burning boundary. It can intercept any enemy unit that falls within this boundary and restrict their movement. This is especially useful when blocking off a path against the nomadic raiding armies. A new campaign map stance available to migratory and nomadic armies is the Raiding stance, which can grant them some income in a turn, but diminishes their movement range. Raiding armies increase unhappiness in a province and have a significant impact on its resource production. Raiding an ally’s territory can ruin your political relations with them.
Rome II let you wait turns while sieging a settlement so you could build siege equipment while camped outside, losing a few men each turn to attrition. In Total War Attila, this concept has been expanded upon as Siege Escalation. In Siege Escalation, the in-game battle map changes to show the effects of prolonged sieging. There is destruction of buildings and walls. Moats get filled in to make paths for the attackers. The settlement looks rather ravaged and there are visible signs of hardship. This sort of attention to detail adds more interest to siege battles that otherwise tend to get very repetitive since you will get a slightly different map if you wait a few turns. You will still lose units to attrition though, but this can be useful if you haven’t any siege equipment in your main army.
There are quite a few historic battles on offer including Adrianople and the Catalunian Plains in Total War Attila. These battles are custom scenarios with some scripted events based on actual battles from History. However, you are restricted in what army you can choose to control in an effort to perhaps change history. Custom Battles now let you autogenerate armies or navies, which adds different units or different veterancies to form a random selection. Those looking for a different challenge should certainly give it a try as having a selection of random units can require interesting tactics. Multiplayer offers the option to play a campaign or a battle similar to that found in Rome II. Naval Battles are less about ramming and more about boarding and missile attacks. Fire is more harmful to a ship than the enemy is though, so you should pay attention to your fleet. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t clearly indicate if a ship is on fire in the unit icons. You can see the sails go up in flames visually though, but that’s usually too late to save the ship.
The Music score has a very Hunnic feel in the menu theme, and the score playing on the campaign map has an epic feel to it. The battle music also sets the mood nicely. However, the variation is lacking and in a long session, you are likely to hear the same music quite a few times, which makes it lose its appeal. Sound effects are excellent in the game. You can hear the murmurs of troops if you zoom the camera in close enough. The levy units can have some female warriors for the nomadic factions, though the historical accuracy of that is debatable. Unit animations are a treat to watch and one must laud the motion capture team for the effort they put into getting these to look authentic. Explosions can have exaggerated effects in terms of the units being thrown away by the force. The graphics aren’t much different from what Rome II offers though there are much fewer options in the setting slider. The game does offer a benchmark to showcase them.
So how did Total War Attila fare in its duel with our iLL reviewer, you might ask. The answer to that would be complicated. While the game showed patches of brilliance, there were several flaws that marred its otherwise superlative performance. It altered the dynamics of its predecessor in an intriguing way to make the gameplay feel fresh. A Heroic Victory, albeit not a Decisive one.[divider]
This game was reviewed on a PC powered by a Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 980 using a developer supplied Review Code. Experience of Retail copies may vary post patches.
