By Eric Keihl

As its rather cumbersome title might indicate, For the Glory: A Europa Universalis Game is quite proud of its ancestry, one which traces all the way back to the 1993 release of the Europa Universalis board game, and which hit its peak with 2001′s Europa Universalis II , a solid PC title which artfully combined the strategic nation management aspects of Civilization with the real-time energy of the Command and Conquer series. Unfortunately for the wider gaming public, For the Glory is so proud of its accomplished big brother that it’s determined to improve almost nothing from the latter game, and consequently ends up offering up an experience that has all the freshness (but little of the fun) of an MC Hammer joke.

Now, I’ll bet you didn’t believe me when I said that almost nothing has been changed, right?  “Surely,” you might be thinking, “a company existing in 2009 can’t just re-release a game from 2001 and charge $20 for it, right?” Well, to be fair, a few new things have been added. The already mind-boggling array of playable countries from EU II has been expanded even further; you now have an international smörgåsbord of over 180 choices. Ever wanted to take the helm of the Iroquois Confederacy? The African Empire of Mali? The Candar Sultanate? Finally, your lifelong dream can come true. Sure, most of the selectable countries (especially those outside of Europe) are too small and economically useless to ever accomplish anything, but what could be more fun than watching helplessly as your country gets swallowed up by rampaging imperialists? Nothing, I dare say, and I’m relatively confident that your average Navajo, Korean, or Frenchman would be quick to agree.

For the Glory also adds a plethora of real historical events for every country to deal with, which I’ll admit offer up some pretty interesting choices. Playing as the German State of Hesse, do I join the Catholic League and risk a war with France and Britain, or stay neutral and give the Austrians reason to invade? Not only do these events add variety and replay value to the gameplay, they’re also genuinely educational, which you certainly can’t say about your average real-time strategy game, Red Alert 3′s valuable insights into Cold War politics excluded.

However, the more things change, the more they stay the same, and adding a few little flourishes is a poor distraction from the fact this game is really nothing more than Europa Universalis II with a different title. The graphics, for example, are unchanged, and since they looked pretty grainy even in 2001 it should come as no surprise that they’re positively hideous by today’s standards. The absurd difficulty curve is also pretty much the same; new players are still bound to be scared away by the quick pace, cumbersome layers of interface, and incomplete tutorials, and it’ll probably take them a few failed playthroughs before they start to grasp any kind of formula for success. Worst of all, the gameplay itself is exactly the same, and all of the little irritations that plagued EU II are carried over wholesale to annoy a new generation of gamers.

But perhaps I’m getting a little ahead of myself. For those unfamiliar with the series, here’s how the aforementioned gameplay works: once you’ve chosen your nation and start date (by default, the game comes to an end in 1819) you’ll be plopped down onto a map of the world. Once you’ve figured out which armies and provinces belong to you (a task made unnecessarily difficult by the default map setting, which doesn’t differentiate national borders,) you’ll begin overseeing your country’s day-to-day domestic operations. This consists mostly of balancing your budget, upgrading your infrastructure and tax collection network, and recruiting soldiers (or hiring mercenaries) to defend your territories. You can also adjust slider bars to make subtle changes to your country’s political, economic, religious and systems, making your nation more or less autocratic, mercantilist, or tolerant of opposing beliefs. These changes, in turn, will effect gameplay elements like recruitment costs, tax revenues, and your diplomatic reputation, allowing you to tweak your country’s production capabilities to suit your current needs. If you’ve got extra gold to spend, you can also send out missionaries to indoctrinate your people with the state religion, or merchants to establish trading posts and bring in some long-term revenue.. Unfortunately, you can’t just send these specialists out wily-nilly: you only have a finite number at any given time, and they regenerate slowly over the course of a year. Not only is this an unnecessarily abstract way of handling things (how does a country with 100,000 people produce two merchants per year?), but in certain situations it can be absolutely infuriating, especially when you see a small groundswell of unhappiness because of religious differences turn into a full-scale revolt because you had to sit and wait patiently for your nation to produce a missionary. Overall, though, once you figure out that most of the basic elements of domestic policy can be handled by simply right-clicking your province (something the game’s woefully inadequate tutorials mention only peripherally) managing your country becomes pretty nicely streamlined, especially if you automate merchant placement and other tedious micromanagement tasks. If you do choose to delegate, however, you might well find that, at least during peacetime, you’ve got absolutely nothing to do except watch history play itself out, which kind of defeats the purpose of playing a game rather than, say, watching a Ken Burns documentary.

Of course, not all of a ruler’s duties lie in the domestic field; you’ll also occasionally need to interact with the smelly foreigners that live along your borders. Fortunately, in the grand tradition of  aristocracy, you don’t have to do any of the legwork yourself. Instead, you’ll send settlers to help you establish control over neutral territories, and diplomats to dictate your foreign policy by forging treaties, delivering insults, or handing out gifts. While the diplomacy in For the Glory is overly simplistic, I’ll give it credit for being reliable: neutral and allied nations will rarely break faith and attack you, while nations that have historical reasons for hating you will try to bully you every chance they get. If things get heated enough, they might even launch into that most profoundly human sector of diplomacy, a good old-fashioned war.

And war, unfortunately, is where the flaws in the Europa engine really start to show themselves. First of all, you can’t start a conflict with somebody by just firing their ambassador’s head out of a catapult and burning a swath through their territory: you have to observe basic formalities and declare it through one of your diplomats. And if you don’t have any diplomats, well… tough cookies, peace will continue its dreadful reign until you do. Even if you’ve got a diplomat lying around, though, it’s important to have a legitimate beef with the person you’re attack, lest your country’s National Stability rating (which effects everything from army morale to trade incomes) come crashing down like a meteorite. Fortunately, it’s not too difficult to produce a casus belli with somebody you want to attack . The easiest way is to just have your diplomats fire off a few insults, since (presumably for stupid reasons like  “honor” and “national dignity,”) your target will eventually return the favor,  giving you carte blanche to stomp all over them. Another good choice, if you’re feeling particularly self-righteous and have lots of money to burn, is to claim the ostentatious title “Sole Defender of the Faith,” which grants you license to attack any non-believers that mess with those who share your theories on postmortal destination. Whichever way you get the war started, though, waging it is bound to be something of a letdown. Land warfare, which makes up most of the action, takes place between only three types of units. Infantry are basically meat shields:  cheap, expendable, and necessary to implement a siege. Cavalry crush infantry in open spaces, but cost a great deal more and are useless in siege situations. Artillery are the most expensive (and most effective,) but require cover from the other two types of units to avoid instant capture. It’s a decent rock-paper-scissors sort of relationship, I guess, but it’s awfully simplistic, and doesn’t really match up with the actual conduct of pre-Napoleonic warfare, where well-positioned infantry with pikes, crossbows, or gunpowder weapons could massacre even the most well-armored cavalry. Anyway, like it or not, you won’t have to bother with any of that complicated “strategy” nonsense, and for the most part all you’ll need to do is build up a big ball of cavalry, drag along a few infantry and cannon for support, and try to make sure your economy doesn’t collapse before you can force the enemy to surrender and cough up the rights to the territories you’ve captured. Oh, and kudos to the developers for having the battles still consist of watching two goofy little animated soldiers poke at each other in a 200 x 50 pixel dirt square. Without a doubt, this kind of epic action captures the chaotic thrill of medieval combat far better than the massive real-time battles of the Total War Series.

Bottom line: For the Glory is a game for Europa Universalis II fanatics only. While its gameplay mechanics are relatively solid, its historical depth is impressive, and its mod-ability will no doubt delight the series’ dedicated online community (which developed much of the new content in the first place,) none of that changes the fact this is a game that’s 8 years old… and definitely shows it. While Europa Universalis II was a decent game, it’s been eclipsed many times over in the years since it’s release, and having a development studio try to charge two sawbucks for it in 2009 is right on the border between embarrassing and insulting. Most gamers would be well advised to give it a miss.

Score: 4/10