Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Here's a game that hits my personal "sweet spot" -- it combines my favorite aspects of the grand strategy, diplomacy, and research/infrastructure-building genre (*cough* Civ *cough) on the one hand, and the real-time tactical battles on the other. The Napoleonic Era is a classic for a recovering wargamer like me, and the eye-candy graphics are simply lovely.
So why am I not giving this five stars? In a word, documentation. Or rather, LACK of documentation. This game follows the lamentable trend of providing the barest minimum of information on how to play, and then publishing the "official guide" as a separate book. In the case of Imperial Glory, you can't even find out what all of the improvements (just to name one example) ARE, let alone what they DO, except (a) by exhaustive trial and error, or (b) coughing up the twenty smackers for the book.
The included hardcopy manual is nice, as far as it goes, which unfortunately isn't very far. Online help is sparse, and the so-called "manual" folder from the install DVD primarily consists of bog-standard FAQ and readme docs and a two-page PDF of keyboard shortcuts. None of this adds up to "adaequate" in my book, and I have three decades of experience with wargames, computerized and not.
What it boils down to is this: This is not a $40 game. It is a $60 game that happens to ship in two separate boxes. Make your cost/benefit calculation accordingly.
One gripe specific to Mac OS X: The note in the FAQ that multiplayer games don't work between Intel Macs and PowerPC Macs ("due to some fundamental hardware differences") is a small but irritating bit of incompetence. My inner geek is screaming that it's gotta be a big-endian/little-endian problem, which means their programmers don't know what the ntohl() and htonl() function calls are for. (Why don't game developers ever hire someone who knows networking to write their networking code...?)
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