Review Score:

I had XIII Century: Blood of Europe sitting here neglected for over a week while I attended to other work but I was absolutely dying to play it. For some reason I was really in the mood for medieval warfare on a grand scale and the box promised to sate my desire with a high degree of realism, accurately recreated battlefields and a system of psychology for troops. It seemed like just the ticket but of course any battle simulator released in the modern day is going to be competing with the Total War series so how does XIII Century: Blood of Europe compare and did it satisfy my lust for glorious battle?

This is yet another 1C Company release developed by Unicorn Games so right away you know that it just isn’t going to display the grandeur of the Total War games with the developers working with far more limited means. Luckily for Unicorn Games, all the glitz and glamour in the world cannot distract strategy gamers from the fact that the AI of the Total War games is actually pretty poor and offers armchair generals very little in the way of a continual challenge. I’ve been saying for a long time that Creative Assembly need strong competition to force them to get their act together and while XIII Century: Blood of Europe has no hope of competing with them in terms of sales, it could potentially show budding tacticians that there do exist better alternatives out there and get the ball rolling.

Prepare for epic warfare.

XIII Century: Blood of Europe offers gamers the titular Blood of Europe campaign, five further campaigns as either England, France, Germany, Russia or the Mongolians as well as several bonus battles that must first be unlocked. There is also a custom game option that allows you to tailor the kind of battle you’ll be fighting in good detail, select from a variety of preset battlefields and includes a random map generator, something which should be included in all strategy games by law. So right there Blood of Europe offers almost unlimited replay value and I haven’t even touched upon the multiplayer options. The question is, would you want to replay the game?

If you’re a veteran of the Total War series as I am you’ll certainly get to grips with Blood of Europe quickly enough because the interface is almost identical but don’t fool yourself into thinking that just because you can win a heroic victory every time in Creative Assembly’s offerings that you’re going to have any easy wins here. Make no mistake about it, Blood of Europe is a hard game and not one you can just sit down and plough through half-heartedly. If you intend to emerge victorious you need to sit down, focus and seriously consider your tactics for the coming battle because not one of them will be a walkover. You won’t be playing battle after battle here, they’re demanding and you’ll likely stop for a break after each one to reflect upon all that came to pass.

Unlike in the Total War games, battles here don't always descend into giant scrums.

The Blood of Europe campaign chronicles the great battles of Dovmont, Knyaz of Pskov, the famous Russian ruler. With each success you gain money that you can then use to train new or upgrade existing troops for the next conflict but I have to be honest, the campaign is so hard I never made it past the first battle in which you’re outnumbered ten to one. The battles you play in the other campaigns are essentially the most infamous 13th century engagements of the nation you have chosen and you are this time given a premade army to deploy. Although these campaigns have a far more sane difficulty curve they quickly become hard in the extreme as well. I don’t have a problem with the level of challenge the game presents though, quite the opposite, it only increases the replayablity of the title further and I can see myself returning time and time again to once again attempt to overcome my dastardly foes.

XIII Century: Blood of Europe and the other games in the series have clearly taken more than a few cues from their greatest rival and the battles will be instantly familiar to anyone who has played a Total War game since Rome: Total War was released. At the beginning of each encounter you have a chance to place your troops anywhere behind a certain boundary. Once your army has been deployed the battle plays out in real time although you can thankfully fast-forward gameplay so you won’t be sitting there waiting too long as soldiers march into position. There are a myriad of tactical options available for each unit including actions like close formation, hold position, fire at will and there are also an incredible amount of statistics on hand to clearly display everything you could possibly want to know from how much experience a regiment has, how good their weapons and armour are to what the status of their morale is.

"Could you boys possibly get any closer to your target?"

Fighting follows the traditional rock, paper, scissors dynamic with spear units annihilating cavalry, cavalry decimating archers and so on which is to be expected since that’s how it was in real life too. Unit psychology has also been very nicely modelled with regiments panicking and running for their lives when the odds seem too stacked against them and staying to fight until the bitter end if they’re experienced and heartened enough. One area where XIII Century: Blood of Europe absolutely embarrasses the Total War games is in how big a role terrain plays throughout the course of a battle. Marshes will bog troops down, elevated positions will make archers lethal and woods are a nightmare for cavalry. As a tactical experience, Blood of Europe is far superior to anything Creative Assembly have produced in the last eight years.

Alas the game is also not without its flaws, few and minor as they may be. Using the keyboard to scroll around the map feels stiff and jumping from direction to direction too swiftly will cause the camera to stop dead while it registers the new key press making fluid movement impossible. This can really frustrate in the heat of battle when you really want to be moving around to see to your troops quickly. Of course you can also pause the game to issue orders and configure your units which lessens the seriousness of this issue considerably and pausing is pretty much essential if you hope to have any degree of control over the chaotic carnage. Enemy troops moving far away appear to jump rather than travel smoothly until they get within a certain distance of the camera, this is an extremely minor and superficial quibble but it can be quite distracting. Finally, the graphics are rather ugly on close inspection even with all settings at their highest. I already acknowledged that we were looking at a work of limited resources here but neither the textures nor the models can compete with those of Medieval 2: Total War from four years ago.

Charging horses and poised spears were not known to get along well.

Naturally the one area that Blood of Europe can’t rival with the Total War games is in their unique blend of turn-based strategy and real time battles because it only consists of the latter. However it feels immediately gratifying to have massive armies at your disposal as opposed to having to slowly build your empire to obtain them. Ultimately though it’s a moot point, Blood of Europe isn’t even trying to compete in this area, it simply offers players the opportunity to partake in some well known historical battles not run an empire. I bring it up here only to clarify the situation for any potential buyers and to put to bed an argument that will inevitably be made against Blood of Europe in that particular war.

Unicorn Games have succeeded in developing a game with a huge degree of tactical depth that simply lacks the shine of its peers. XIII Century: Blood of Europe can therefore feel like a rough experience but it’s always a satisfying one. When we compare it with the battles of the Total War series what we basically have is a classic case of brains versus beauty and personally, I’m opting for brains every single time. Yeah so Blood of Europe isn’t the prettiest of games but the conflicts are usually so large scale that very rarely will you be zoomed in far enough to notice. The fact of the matter is that it offers a genuine tactical challenge within the context of painfully recreated historical scenarios and I haven’t had so much fun with a game in a long time. There is actually a Gold edition available that includes additional battles and I’ve already decided to break open my coffers to purchase it and if I’m willing to spend my own coin for more of the same, you can guarantee that the “same” is pretty damn excellent.

Final Score – 4/5: XIII Century: Blood of Europe is a tremendous and challenging game that offers near limitless replayability but just lacks the sparkle and finesse of larger titles. Overall, this one’s a champion.