Napoleon: Total War

Napoleon: Total war is the most cinematic Total War game I have played to date. The game-play alternates between a "campaign map" which has players moving their armies around Europe, Italy, or North Africa and the Middle East depending on the campaign selected.  Here the world map is a lush animated map reminiscent of an interactive board game. Diplomacy, management of your empire and recruitment is taken care in this part of the game. Here players can also take turns moving their various agents and armies around and declaring missions or battles respectively across the map. If you have played a Total War game before this should be familiar to you. Armies are recruited at region capitals or main cities using currency generated by natural resource wealth and taxation. Agents are spawned randomly at intellectual centers which are fairly rare as not all provinces have them. As a result, your various armies have an upkeep while agents do not.This might be a new concept to Total War players who skipped Empire because of negative press and are looking to have a similar experience. 
 
The second aspect is the real time strategy battles that involve hundreds (and in some cases thousands) of men or various fleets of warships. This is where the polish of Napoleon shows. Every battlefield is a visual treat with trees swaying in the wind or troops hiding in tall lush grass. There are various weather effects which have an impact on combat such as rain. All of this is beautify displayed by the creative assembly. The main visual draw are the battle effects and they really show the effort put into this game. Muzzles flash and smoke lingers among your troops creating absolute chaos in city fights as the smoke clouds congregate in a single place. This does not affect the game's playability as the UI is very cleverly designed to give the player absolute control of his units even in the chaos of melee. Siege battles are a treat to play as there are very little issues with unit pathfinding and the battle cries of your troops as they scale the wall only to bayonet the hapless defenders makes the already impressive battle system fantastic. There is also combat on the high seas (introduced in Empire) that has also been given polish to produce a breath taking event every skirmish. I often find myself losing naval battles because i spend too much time zooming in on the level of detail applied to the crews and battle effects on the ships. The only fault with the real time portion of the game is that the AI tends to be unable to handle more advanced tactics, sometimes completely halting it's armies and allowing the timer to time out (providing you set it) to make instant defeats into heroic victories. 
 
The AI is a small problem when you look at the effort put into the game's multiplayer. The drop-in battle system means that instead of having to face AI you can face any opponent that joins your game just for that battle. There is also an option to have a multiplayer campaign where you and another player select 2 different factions and can drop in to any battle played in that campaign which eliminates the real time AI completely. 
 
While Napoleon doesn't offer the same level of scale as Empire (less campaign factions, less maps) it really fleshes out the Europe campaign and creates involved smaller campaigns that have strict goals with aim given to a faction instead of the more sandbox approach of previous grand campaigns in the series. This is a good thing as it makes battles more meaningful and creates a opportunity for a more multiplayer friendly grand-strategy game. A step in the right direction in every sense for the Creative Assembly a few creases that are easily ironed out  makes this the most enjoyable Total War game I have played to date.