Let’s look at a few of the more prominent features. I purchased no DLC races, cos I still think that is a shitty practice and my Eastern Roman playthrough was with only the first couple of DLCs out, so no Slavs, no Desert Tribes and no White Huns.Īs part of Total War’s marketing campaign new games must have new FEATURES tm.Īttila has the usual collection of new and adapted elements and I think most need refinement. I did come back to that Frank campaign and with some careful save scumming managed to kill the three Hun stacks that were chasing me (in a battle which I had to spend 80% of the time paused to win) and then move on and conquer Italy and bummed around a bit until 413 and then got bored again. I also undertook a Hunnic campaign that I gave up once I bought Age of Charlemagne in a sale and a Ostrogothic campaign that I alt-f4’ed out of in the year 407 AD cos the game can just go fuck itself.
nothing fun left to do, a Frankish campaign with the Radious mod which I played for a couple of hundred turns and Western Roman campaign which I played until the huns were dead and the Roman Empire was restored. An Eastern Roman campaign played to completion i.e. There are four main issues I have: poorly implemented mechanics, faction identity, the Huns and late game.įor the record I have played three main campaigns in Attila. I think Attila gives the image of a good game but it is fundamentally flawed. I think those 300+ hours (admittedly a fair chunk of that is in Age of Charlemagne) I have spent on the game are a rather misleading reflection of the game’s worth. I have 300hrs of playtime on the fucker, so clearly I don’t hate it, but it did leave me a bit cold and I think there is a lot wrong with the game. I’ll save the retrospective on the series as a whole for another day and instead focus on the most recent of the historical series Total War: Attila.
I like these games, in part for their own merits and in part because I have never seen a game that adequately offered an alternative to their grand strategy plus real times battles formula. Over a decade I have enjoyed and complained about these games, even dipping my toes into online communities such as TWcentre and the Total War subreddit, even though normally I would avoid gamers like the fucking plague. The Total War series is the gaming franchise I have stuck with the longest.