I have been a huge Total War fan for as far as I can remember. I started my relationship with the games with Rome: Total War, and since then I’ve bought and loved every instalment in the series. I love strategy, I love the challenge of planning my attack and then having to change everything because of one little thing going wrong somewhere. It’s even better when heavy lore is thrown into the mix – and in Total War‘s case, its true history. Well, up until you slowly take over Europe and make the entirety of it – and India – Danish. It’s a hugely successful and incredibly fun series, and after Rome II’s slightly rocky launch, I was worried as to how Attila would shape up to be – but let me assure you, I’m not disappointed.
Attila looks quite similar to Rome II in terms of visuals (and quite a lot of the menus). In actuality, the game is quite different – well, as different as a Total War game can be the other games in the series. Attila introduces new mechanics to the game, and very interesting ones at that. The atmosphere of the game in combination with that really gives an apocalyptic feel to the world, which is undoubtedly what the Romans and her allies must’ve assumed was happening as Attila marched across Europe with his army of Huns. I think one of the best things about this game is that the Huns really do put the total war in the game’s name. Playing as them in the grand campaign means that you’ll spend most of your time fighting, whether it be against weak states with an army consisting only of peasants, or an entire Roman legion with deadly legionaries and cavalry – Attila doesn’t care, and sees it only as a way to become richer and more powerful.
If you’re a veteran player of the series, you’ll see that that is quite a different way to play the game. Traditionally, factions would build settlements, upgrade smaller ones to become larger, assign them a speciality such as mining, farming, education and so forth in order to build up your empire and gain wealth. With barbarians in Attila, you spend almost all of your time destroying those settlements, razing them to the ground and causing terror in your opponents. Your bonuses are best when you are at war, not at peace, whereas the story is pretty different if you’re playing as the Romans, as it’s more sensible to play a defensive game instead.
The game world in Attila is larger than in Rome II, as it features more of northern Europe – such as the Urals in modern day Russia – and with that, comes expanded weather and climates. Northern Europe gets colder as the time goes by, as expected, and that means that fertility drops. Low fertility means no food, and no food means angry people, so many factions become nomadic tribes. This can happen during the game, but there are 4 factions which begin as Nomadic tribes (my favourite ones are the Alans, which I think is a superb name for a tribe). Their bonuses are – if you haven’t already guessed – centred on settling and uprooting. The Franks and the Saxons even get a bonus for converting buildings belonging to other factions, meaning you can go all Age of Empires on your enemies. It’s great for collapsing Rome!
The other three factions are the civilised ones. Or, well, as civilised as they could be for their time, as history tells us that despite having education and whatnot, they were still quite barbaric in how they behaved. Those are – as you’ve probably guessed by the game’s settings – the Western Roman Empire, who are massively wealthy but lack military prowess, the Eastern Roman Empire, who are both wealthy and aggressive, though are surrounded by their enemies, and the other faction is the Sassanid’s, who’re powerful and only really threatened by the Huns and the Eastern Romans. It’s a disappointing number of factions for a Total War game I will be honest, especially in comparison to how many unplayable factions there are. No doubt more will be added in the future as a form of everyone’s favourite practice, DLC, as that is the common trend for video games right now. However, if the factions added in the future do have the same sort of personality and unique playstyle as the others in the game, then I shan’t complain too much!
Previously in Total War games, there was a mix of random and timed notifications during your campaign. For example, during Empire, you were notified of scientific discoveries that took place in reality in that same year, whereas generally new agents and generals were just randomly born. In Attila, when you play as the eponymous leader himself, the family events and dilemmas are the same. I greatly enjoy this feature; it really builds up the idea of Attila being the scourge of mankind, bringer of chaos and destruction, by telling you about his life, his story, and his conquest across Europe. Total War has already been about history. Some games in the series sometimes lack that historical representation of real leaders who lived and died in those times, such as Horatio Nelson and Napoleon Bonaparte, and it especially lacked the representation of Kings and Queens.
Another favourite thing of mine in Attila is how damn difficult the game is. Rome II was very underwhelming in difficulty, it had challenge but it was nowhere near as hard as I was expecting it to be. I used AI mods from the workshop to get that classic Total War challenge I wanted, and I shouldn’t have to do that. The Creative Assembly have certainly heeded that complain from the last game, as the campaign screen and the battles themselves are incredibly challenging. You’ll find yourself suddenly swarmed by your enemy in a matter of turns, giving you only enough time to build a small defence force. At that point, your best option is to hope that you have enough men left to flee, so you can try to reach a settlement and garrison there instead, which will hopefully give you enough time to build a proper army to stop the wrath of Attila from destroying you.
That’s not to say that playing as Attila’s Huns is easy, it’s most certainly the opposite. The difficulty with the Huns is that they’re a completely new style of playing, the hordes are brand new to Total War and they play very differently from the traditional static factions. You’ll find yourself fighting the three big, organised, civilised factions all at once, and you might even annoy other factions in your path to victory too, meaning you’ll make a lot of enemies. A lot of enemies mean they might team up against you in order to put a stop to your advance. Huns are famous for their horses, especially their cavalry, and as you might expect, horses don’t fare very well during sieges. When a Hun is facing off against an army without their horses, they’re at quite a surprising disadvantage, which makes those battles significantly more difficult than battles where you’re on a field. Then you can use horses, and mounted archers with flaming arrows are spectacularly good (and a lot of fun to watch, too, with the new fire mechanics!).
I realise I’m talking a lot about hordes here, but that is – after all – a very central mechanic in the game. It’s an entirely new way of playing the game, an intuitive and much needed new addition to a game which was beginning to teeter on the edge of becoming somewhat boring to play. Each of your hordes is both your city and your army; they’ll produce food and soldiers, and can also fight in battles. Much like losing a city as a static faction, you’ll find that losing a horde – or having one damaged so significantly that they have the power of a single Roman peasant – is a stunning blow to your campaign. It can give your enemy the edge they need to push you out of a region – or even out of existence.
One irritation I do have with hordes, however, is their strange way of settling. I’m not sure whether it’s totally intentional, but when you settle your horde in a pre-existing location that’s been abandoned, or when you settle in razed land, you lose your tents and all bonuses that came with them. All of them. This is an issue because it can send you into bankruptcy near instantly because the buildings which generated money are now gone and maintaining a mobile civilisation is expensive. In order to create new hordes, you need a combination of food, tent industries, and money. As you can imagine, it’s difficult to build on the go, so therefore you must find somewhere to settle in order to start building the things you’ll need to create a new horde for your mighty nomadic army. I find it strange that you’ll find yourself sitting around a surprising amount as a nomadic tribe. Very strange indeed.
The performance of the game was, as expected from The Creative Assembly, outstanding. My PC uses an over clocked GTX 770 with an i5-3570k CPU, so it’s more than capable of running almost every modern game with high and ultra settings, and I was getting a comfortable 40/50 FPS on the campaign and during battles. Although, Attila is plagued by the infamous end-of-turn lag spike as the AI take their turns. I feel as though it’s not something that the developers can help, and that its core to the engine and thus is unsolvable, as it’s been an issue since the dawn of the series.
Overall, Total War: Attila is an outstanding instalment into the series. It builds on the strong points of Rome II and delivers impressive new mechanics which do work, for the most part, with some minor irritations which can honestly be put aside. The lovely new fire effects bring a new challenge to the battles, and the city razing gives you the option to leave nothing behind for the scavenger factions, ultimately giving you brand new ways to play the game in conjunction with the new horde factions. The game is as beautiful as Rome II, and delivers a much improved set of animations, music, sounds, user-friendliness, army customisation and empire management. Total War is still not perfect, but it’s getting closer with each release.