American Conquest: Divided Nation review

There’s something a little insidious about the words ‘stand-alone expansion pack’. As if they’re reaching out with one hand and slapping away with the other. As if they’re offering a brand new game, but one tricked out with nothing more than minor engine and feature tweaks to distance it from the original. Divided Nation is the second so-called stand-alone expansion pack in the American Conquest trilogy. I think that speaks volumes. Job done. Let’s go home.

Oh alright, if you must. AC:DN is another concentrated history lesson of that wretched colony’s tawdry past in RTS form, taking in the period of American History in which the U.S. was anything but civil and decided a war was the only way to settle their differences. In the real world that amounts to four sides, the Union, Confederacy, Texas and Mexico, marching and flanking in formation through Gettysburg, the Alamo, all of that, in an isometric RTS that almost creaks with age, such are its looks.

War Is Ugly

To blame the engine isn’t entirely fair, but it’s where we’ll start because for one, it has its faults. To wit, the zoom function: there’s only two options, close-up and far-out. The lack of a scaleable option is an irritant when close-up is too close and far-out, well, it’s hard to pick out your men, and graphical glitches when scrolling don’t do it any favours either. It’s also near impossible to spot your troops if they ever enter a wooded area. Right, that’ll do for a start. I think we’ve established that it hasn’t the friendliest of engines.

Or interfaces for that matter. The selling-point behind this series is the beguiling number of troops on-screen at once - a factor they’ve been pushing since the ancient Cossacks. A pleasant experience, indeed, when things go according to plan, and vast columns of soldiers sweep across the landscape, executing deft strategic manoeuvres. Realistically, though, a pain as swarms of little men react to the minutiae of your control, getting jumbled up and lost, and leading to endless molly-coddling. Especially annoying when they succumb to flagging morale and decide to flee individually across the map, leaving you to tediously scoop up deserters. For some people, though, that’s all they’d expect from an RTS like this, and the supposedly helpful pause and move mode helps in this respect. It doesn’t, however, by having a obscuring bar displaying the word ‘Pause’ slap-bang in the middle of the screen. Whuh?

Conquest and Conquer

The main complaint, though, is that historical accuracy lets variety down. Despite the huge number of infantry units, there’s a lack of differentiation. One man with a gun is the same as any other, and even if there are any differences, it’s hard to pick them out in a faceless crowd just as generals and officers and the like are hard to recognise in the midst of your strategic viewpoint. It may pander to realism, but it doesn’t to fun. A lack of tactile feedback doesn’t help either. Face off against the enemy and they seem to take an age to die despite what looks like superior tactics. It’s all to do with terrain and morale advantages, yet, visually, it’s not always clear what your tactics are, leading instead to interpreting abstract statistics in small menus. No tutorial and the barest of objectives outline its user-unfriendly nature, and even RTFMing dredges up nothing but a badly-written booklet with information jumbled in the obscurest of places. At one point I was asked to blow up a few bridges leading to the battlefield. Dutifully searching on how to place dynamite resulted in not a scratch despite going through several kegs. Imagine my surprise when the lesser-known ‘shoot at it with cannons’ proved to be the effective and unwritten answer.

The bulk of the well-sized campaign mostly eschews economical and resource concerns. The random map skirmish mode has it in droves. Six different resources to plunder indicates the level of depth and of archaic tradition we’re aiming at here. The tedious upgrading and outputting of workers and soldiers – hundreds of the buggers – made worse by the prosaic nature of the input. And the fact that the AI team always seems to be one step ahead of you. Although, it’s not all roses in that department: I’ve witnessed the enemy endlessly circling a house as we fired merrily at their weak defences just a much as my own men have been seen circumnavigating an entire field when a gap in the fence proved too much.

That’s the downers, though, as said, it’s perfectly OK to give flanks, er, thanks to the makers when you come across a strategic way to defeat an enemy that regularly gives no quarter. No, to be fair, AC:DN isn’t a bad game per se. It’s just an anachronistic burp from long ago, repeating itself with an apologetic grin and a flutter of its eyelashes to turn into an average RTS of today. Er, I’ve got no idea where this metaphor’s going. Just look at the score.