Empire Total War (ETW) is a game that is all about history. We’re not talking about the fact that the game is set in the 18th century, or that it contains more information about the past than a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. No, we’re referring to the fact that ETW harks back to the glory days of PC gaming, when PC games were for men, and consoles were for toddlers obsessed with cute plumbers. The fifth title in The Creative Assembly’s incredibly successful Total War series, ETW is a glorious example of all that PC gaming can be, and all that consoles can’t.

And yet, it’s also a hideous reminder of why the only gaming related activities many PCs see today is the occasional visit to www.gamefaqs.com. For every warm reminder of why PC gaming can offer infinitely more depth than its console cousins, ETW serves as an equally frustrating reminder of why PC gaming is best left to those with Computer Science degrees hanging in the study. It’s a game that is at once both intensely rewarding and infinitely aggravating.

If you’ve never played a Total War game before, know that it’s really two games in one. There’s the campaign game, which plays out much like Civilization. From this interface you’ll watch your fledging nation slowly unfold across the three separate theatres of Europe, North America and India. It’s a massive world, and weeks of game time will see you barely scratching the surface. We’re ashamed to admit that, based on the percentage of the game we’ve seen, this is the least prepared we’ve ever been for a game review. And we’ve played it every night for the last week, racking up at least twenty hours of play time. Yet we’ve seen easily less than ten percent of what this game has to offer.

If and when you do conquer the world, you’ll start all over again as one of eleven different nations, each using different units, technologies and strategies. Whether you favour the naval focus of the British, or the superb battlefield emphasis of the Austrians, there’s a style of challenge to suit all potential armchair Napoleons. It’s the kind of depth that used to be the norm for PC games, back when Windows was the lead platform and game length was measured in weeks and months, not hours and minutes.

The Campaign mode is the sedate, enjoy-a-nice-glass-of-Pinot-Noir, part of the ETW experience. It’s a turn-based affair, so you can sit back and plan which territories to conquer, which capitals to sabotage and which ports to torch, at your leisure. But when your lust for violence breaks through the thin veneer of your gentlemanly ways, pour a stiff Scotch on the rocks and get ready for the intense real-time action that is the game’s battle mode.

With up to forty units on the field at a time, each comprised of hundreds of soldiers, these battles are truly epic. There’s no other game in existence which captures the horror of thousands of men charging headlong into the weapons of their foes, and it’s even more terrible with the cannons and muskets that play such a large part in ETW. Watching two opposing groups holding their lines and standing face to face within spitting distance of each other, as they fire, reload, fire, reload, fire, reload is a brutal sight. We can only imagine how horrible these battles will appear once the inevitable blood mod is released, a feature sorely missing from a game which otherwise depicts the brutality of 18th century combat so mercilessly. These battles require the CPU horsepower, alongside a mouse’s speed and accuracy, that consoles can only dream of. This is a true, made-for-PC game, rather than the console ported filler that clogs up our PC hard drives these days.

The Campaign and Battle maps are closely intertwined – the armies you build and move in the campaign mode are the same ones you’ll use on the battlefield. If you haven’t invested heavily enough in cannon design or formation research on the campaign map, your troops on the battlefield will have to rely more heavily on numbers to have any chance of victory. Battle outcomes also affect the campaign game – fail to wipe the battlefield clean of all enemies, and you’ll see the enemy army gather their wits on the campaign map, joining up with other forces before challenging you again.

For those familiar with the Total War series, it’s business as usual, but bigger and better. Wisely, ETW hasn’t wiped the slate clean of its past lessons, and retains most of the mechanics of the earlier Total War games. Yet everything has been given a subtle spit and polish, with a few key areas receiving the most attention.

A fully fledged technology tree is much easier to use than in earlier games, with a simple interface making it easy to see where differing technologies conflict. Finding out what’s happening in your campaign is a cinch thanks to the list feature, which shows you at a glance which armies you own, which territories you inhabit (and are thus taxing) and which fleets you’re sailing. General path-finding issues are much improved, and it’s claimed the AI in both Campaign and Battle maps have been given a strong dose of deviousness.

The biggest bullet point on the back of the box goes to naval warfare. For the first time in a Total War game, battles at sea float alongside their land-locked companions. Sadly, at least in our first week, the sea-borne sagas have been more Love Boat than Master and Commander. The slow, ponderous pace of the battles, and a real disconnect between our orders and what our virtual sailors chose to do, resulted in conflicts that came across as clumsy and confusing, rather than exciting or explosive. Having said that, we have only spent about a week with these ships, so time will tell whether it’s the game’s fault or ours.

One fault that we know definitely isn’t ours is the massive numbers of bugs that ETW shipped with. From glitchy graphics, to show-stopping crashes, to demented AI, ETW makes a Rastafarian’s filthy dreadlocks look positively free of creepy-crawlies. The ETW forums are a casualty ward of disappointed gamers, and even the first patch has done little to solve the problems. We struggle to remember the last time a PC game shipped with this many issues.

And then there’s the performance. We can understand that rendering thousands of detailed soldiers with HDR lighting and depth of field effects would be enough to bring our 4GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB DDR2 RAM and 8800GTX-equipped PC to its knees. But the relatively simple graphics of the campaign mode shouldn’t do the same, hinting at deeper issues than just demanding performance. It’s a long way from the relatively accommodating requirements of other recent PC titles such as Dawn of War II and Call of Duty: WaW, and hearkens back to the bad old days when you needed to wait two years from a game’s launch for a PC to come out that could run it.

Yet despite these problems, the first thing we’re doing once we’ve finished this review is firing up ETW. No doubt we’ll spend another five minutes tweaking the complicated graphics options, and then watch it crash to the desktop as soon as we’ve found just the right settings. But when it does stop crashing, ETW reminds us that despite the issues of PC gaming, there’s a depth and complexity to the platform that is so far removed from console gaming that the words Total War and Xbox probably shouldn’t be on the same page, let alone sentence.