Excitement Deluxe : All Substance not Hyped Glitz !
User Rating: 8.9 | Europa Universalis III PC
The title says it, EU III is all substance and not glitz. With this historical strategy game be prepared to spend countless hours trying your hand at creative empire building on the grand scale. By that qualification I mean, this game is NOT about world conquest and subjugation of other countries as such, in fact if you approach it like that you are bound to loose and incure severe penalties to your country's prestige and inivite aggression against you. On the contrary, you are responsible for controlling and shaping your country destiny via domestic and foreign policies, that allow to prosper as a nation and yes to a certain degree you can create your own historical legacy and outcomes even though the game does maintain overall reasonable historical accuracy reflecting a period between 15 century and late 18 th century, 350 years or so...its an awesome game, gameplay is very immersive and easy (there is a good tutorial for newbies), needless to say the soundtrack also brings to life the era nicely . Moreover I find Paradox has made great strides forward with including a well desgined 3 D world map, only flaw I find here are the unit models, the rendering could have been more detailed, but overall visually the world map is attractive and its fun to zoom in and out at various levels or to view combat that way. This game is for those who like play and shape international history and prefer complexity and thoughtful challenge over glitz, hyped up grafiphs or war mongering or destructive mayhem thats become so common place in most mainstream strategy games these days. Therefore GO AND BUY THIS GAME, ITS MONEY WELL SPENT !
Only thing I will scold Paradox for is their lack of distribution in Canada. The game seems to be found nowhere on the shelves of major retailers (maybe only exception might be EB Games here), this certainly is a wonderful way of keeping the game restricted to a niche following, but ultimately prevents the game from being known to a wider audience (beyond hardcore Paradox fans) esp in Canada. So Paradox buck up and flood this game into Canada, so people enjoy it ! No worries, there is an alternative ....you can alternatively download the game at GAMERSGATE.com, I downloaded it from there and had no problems, I also got the game 's100 page manual with it ! Wonderful :)
