Imperial Glory (PC)

Imperial Glory devotes a huge amount of energy to recreating early 19th-century battles.

Herald rating * * *

Caption1: Imperial Glory devotes a huge amount of energy to recreating early 19th-century battles.

When you think of the Napoleonic wars, you think of big naval battles, cannons and funny troop formations. All these are in Imperial Glory, which devotes a huge amount of energy to recreating early 19th-century battles.

But the game is actually better value for its strategy element - building empires and political manoeuvring. There's a reason the best strategy games, such as Civilization, stay away from 3D animated battles: they're hard to do well, and the combat is the weak part of Imperial Glory.

The game allows you to play one of the five powers that dominated Europe during the early 19th century - France, Britain, Austria, Prussia or Russia.

Britain is relatively safe across the water and guarded by the Navy, but lacks resources. Russia has a vast border vulnerable to attack, but a big population. The others such as Spain and Denmark, are just there for conquering. All are preoccupied with gold, producing materials and food and growing their populations and influence.

Begin trading with neighbouring countries, set up newspapers to spread propaganda and crank up food production.

A sympathy rating of 1 to 100 is central to how you are perceived by the other European countries. Develop alliances and pay tribute and your rating goes up. If it hits 100, you can subsume allies. They join the empire and you acquire their armies.

You can take over Europe peacefully, but that will take forever. Eventually you'll have to go to war with the computer. Then the game becomes a race to crank out as many new units as possible. They can be produced only in capital cities and you then have to get them to the front line before the enemy advances.

The battles are a chaotic distraction, especially the Master and Commander-like naval encounters. They look nice but are hard to play. Before you know it, you've sunk half your own fleet by mistake and are sailing in the wrong direction.

On land are all sorts of cavalry, artillery and infantry units to control. Depending on where you are waging war, the scenery will change, from the icy surrounds of Russia to the green fields of France. There's even some street fighting in Paris and Vienna.

The battles are impressive and seem historically accurate. But the artificial intelligence doesn't seem very smart, and close up things become chaotic.

Complicated battle scenes are merciless on slow computers. You'll want a Pentium 4 with a 2GHz processor and 512MB of memory to play Imperial Glory, which is a good effort at a historical strategy game but lacks the finesse of Rome: Total War.

* $100