Imperial Glory offers a fun and user friendly gaming experience.
You probably heard the game resembles Medieval Total War in many ways, and thats true. Same basic concepts, same graphics more or less, same stuff happening. Though I have to admit I enjoyed this one more than I did the Medieval series. This one is actually very user friendly. Newcomers wont have too much of a hard time trying to master the game compared to the medieval games. Even I had problems with Medieval 2 and I played the first one over and over. But Imperial Glory offers a tutorial for all 3 of the game instances that you will need: a land troop tutorial, a sea-ships tutorial and finally a general overall economy and politics tutorial. You'll probably learn all you need to know in about 30 minutes.
The graphics are pretty good too. I had some troubles running Medieval 2 when I saw the entire battlefield, but this game runs like a dream. I was quite impressed with the designers. I always enjoy a game that is designed and programmed well that runs on lower end machines too. It's worth the money you pay. Small things on the battlefield are really fun to watch too. If you zoom in on your soldiers you will see them move independantly and have different color hair and faces.
One thing that the game is really lacking is the option to select any nation on the map that you want to play. For some reason you can only play the really large empires like Russia, Prussia, France, Britain and others.... but none of the smaller states. There are about 25 computer players controlling other empires while you play but you can only pick one among 6 as your own. It kinda gets boring after a while once you finish it with one nation. Although each empire has a set of unique units with their special advantages.
Even so, I enjoyed the game quite a lot. I was really looking for a strategy game that wasn't such a pain to follow and learn. Imperial Glory shows you how to play in an easy and fun way. The game itself isn't too hard either. Other games of the genre get too caught up with the detail that they lose their appeal pretty fast since they take so long. In this you only have to pay attention to a limited number of things. I recommend it to anyone interested in an empire building strategy game.