Love

1. It has character

With alot of historical based games, they can at times feel sterile, distant and just playing boring. When Rome: Total War arrived, instead of just giving you a dry interpretation, you were given something infused with character and attitude. It made history seem exciting. It made people who had no interest in the strategy genre take interest. Instead of what appeared to be 12 sprites looked upon from 20 feet above, you were controlling thousands of highly detailed units with heart pounding battles. A sense of grandeur and scope that gave a hint of how epic these battles could have really been.

Even the games tutorial was (is) full of character. Typically an older alpha male general blurting out gleeful ways to kill the enemy real time. And a more cerebral female presence on the turn based map dealing with the management aspect. The music itself from real time to turn based goes from thumping, epic battle music to chilled, relaxed reflection music. Total War is a very immersive experience in a genre typically not seen as immersive. It captures each time period with style and zest, bringing it to life.

2. It's cinematic without being detrimental to the gameplay

When you look at something like Call Of Duty, or other suppose cinematic games such as Heavy Rain. the player doesn't have very much input. Call Of Duty consists of near enough walking in a line watching scripted sequences go off. Heavy Rain seems outright reluctant to give the player direct control. In Total War, you have battles of huge, huge scope that easily arrival anything put on screen on a near continual basis. With you, the player directing it as it happens and how or if it happens. Unlike most strategy games, Total War is a game you can watch, without playing and still enjoy.

3. Pushing the boundaries of Scale VS Detail

Total War: Shogun 2 never won any graphic awards. People waffled about Uncharted mainly. Uncharted, is a linear game with tight environments with most of the good visual presentation coming from pre-rendered cut-scenes. In Shogun 2 you have highly detailed models and animations going off real time with thousands of people on screen at once. For it's specific genre, Total War more than any other game has pushed visual fidelity. Arguebly for any game, in fact. You will not find something matching the same scale VS detail in any other game barring perhaps a modded Crysis.

4. Skill Wins

While in Total War you can level up characters making them stronger with experience, or use units with higher stats, this does not mean an automatic win like many other strategy games. If a player is playing tactically superior, they can beat a force of greater magnitude with more powerful units. Terrain height can be used to give sifnicant advantage. Wedges and pockets can create death traps. Wittling away or overwhelming fragments can cause units to panic and route due to low moral. Using stealth, a player can outright circle an enemy and remove any artillery sitting behind the lines. The game is chalked full of variables and possibilities.

5. It's accessible without being dumb

I had mew nephew (who is 7) playing Napoleon Total War the other day. The main issue he had, wasn't the game, it was the keyboard because he is so use to playing on his Playstation 3. He had never played a strategy game before and I actually had to explain to him what one is. Within about 15 minutes, he was quite happily playing a real time battle.

Gaming today, is dumb. It's simplistic dude-bro games becoming increasingly dumber. Heavily streamlined games, games that outright play themselves and a media black out on any game that isn't mainstream means many specific genres that are more sophisticate in nature get a black out. Total War is an accessible game. A 7 year old can play it. It isn't a dumb game though. It's easy to learn, hard to master. Rather than just... easy. In actuality, Empire: Total War went in the exact opposite direction of what most games are doing today. While games become increasingly simpler, by comparison, Empire was more complited than it's fore bearers. Along with a very small pool of games, Total War remains last bastion of AAA quality games that require thinking. Thank Christ is exists. But, for how long? Hmm.

Bad

1. AI is stupid

2. Pre-order DLC

3. Buggy, terrible launch typically

4. Thats it can't think of anything else

5. Filling up space.

Also not enough black people.

While Gears Of War didn't invent wall cover, it did popularized it. Multiple games now use third person wall cover. And for practically every genre it is associated with, it is awful for the most part.

A good example is a game I was playing recently, Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

With in the games skill tree, the player can spend experience points that allow a greater sense of awareness. Agumented vision that shows enemy through walls. Pinpoint markers show enemy position beyond the boundaries of wall.

This mostly becomes moot however, when the player can simple glue themselves to a wall, and have a full 180 degrees viewpoint from a third person perspective.

In the case of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, even though it does seem to fit the gameplay and outright makes aspects irrelevant, it is in their. Most likely on the basis, thats it's a popular console mechanic. This is outright bad game design in my opinion.

For practically every action game that uses this mechanic, the AI cannot cope. In Mass Effect the AI will blindy run towards you regardless of you being unhittbable. It doesn't take your wall cover into account For supposed "tactical games" like Rainbow 6: Vegas you once have a full 180 degree view without any limiting. Simply pop up your head, fire, duck. Rinse and repeat. The advantage third person wall cover gives, is huge. The AI for the most part, cannot cope with it and the mechanic itself (to me at least) is outright boring. When I think of action games, I think of something visceral like MDK. Doing strafe circles around dozens of enemy. Sitting in a corner, popping my head up and down with bursts of fire, is practically the exact opposite of visceral.

It seems to be me, this mechanic would work much better as a first person only mechanic. Without the ability to pull out to third person for a full 180 degree viewpoint. In a game such as "Red Orchestra 2" using wall cover delivery limits what the player can see giving disadvantage as well as advantage. Aside from not having a full view in front of them, they also lack side and back views. This limitation makes the tic-tack-to of battles far more interesting than they would if you could simply pull out into third person.

I was browsing another forum some months back when EA announced Bioware (not really Bioware just the name whored around due to Bioware having no self-respect these days) had a new command and conquer game in works during the awful spike awards.

The initial response of the users was along the lines of "this is a waste of Biowares time". Like, somehow Bioware was above this genre. The thing I found odd about this, Bioware can't make balanced games. For a strategy game, this is of the upmost importance. So, it doesn't exactly seem that the talent is so far above the genre that it's inconsequential. Which I mentioned. When simply asking people why they had this response, they replied "because I don't like strategy games". "Bioware should stick to what they are good at".

Firstly, this argument that if you make a specific genre of game, in the case of Bioware, RPG's, strikes me as preposterous. Bliizzard make RPGs, very succeful and praised ones such as Diablo and World Of Warcraft. They also make Starcraft, probably the most popular strategy game in existence. Why should a developer, yet unproven in that specific feild "stick to what they are good at"?

Given how formulaic Bioware has become, how focused action games have become with strategy games becoming increasingly rationed, why exactly would this be a bad thing?

The only hypothetical I could come to, is that they were console gamers. With no interest in playing pc games, or specifically, control schemes better suited for the pc. Which seems fair, I suppose.

Or perhaps it's something even fundamentally worse than this, the thinking that strategy games are incaptitible of delivering story telling comparable to that of RPGs.

Well, son, I would point you to Homeworld or Warcraft III. While many people praise Metal Gear Solid for being cinematically groundbreaking, Homeworld was far more ground breaking, moving away from a top down view, using full three-dimensional gameplay and delivering an epic story telling of races fighting against extinction with a cinematic zest that is sorely lacking from mostly, derivative strategy games from today. Homeworld, made you care about the units you were controlling, an emotional attachment to them, through the story telling was developed.

Likewise, when it comes to battles, while games like Call Of Duty and Battlefield or Mass Effect use scripted events to give the illusion of scale, in alot of strategy games such as Sins Of The Solar Empire, or practically any Total War game, when thousands of units are battling on screen at once, it's happening real time with the ability to interact.

I can't really pin my finger on a single reason, it seems to be multiple reasons for this anti strategy game attitude, it seems to be a genre dismissed by mainstream gamers, specifically console gamers along with the mainstream press, that is supposedly suppost to be unbais but really, if it's not Blizzard, it doesn't exist. It is rather annoying and somewat depressing.