So.. How would we want to classify East India Company?
I personally think that it’s more important for us to identify this game first, before we jump into our review. Defining preview build #2 depends on which angle you’re looking at, and the results from that may give you a different taste.
East India Company has a mix of popular elements from the previously released titles, with RTS + trading system that Sid Meier’s Pirates! fans might be familiar with. Well, at least in writings we as gamers should be familiar with it, but not really. The gaming system in this game is much more complex that it might not be for everyone. If you love simple RTS games, you might not like it, unless you’re willing to give up some time to learn. But if you love micromanagement, this game is a perfect fit.
In the preview version, the tutorial mode was all in text, or at least it was non-interactive to the point where it feels even more like a micromanagement than it has to be. To give it some credit, this is only a preview build so the final version could be very different.
After the player selects the campaign and difficulty, the world map shows up. You can either tell your captains of the ship to travel with automatic routing, or you can manually tell them where to go. Once the ship goes into port, you gain access to the port. If opted for the automatic routing for trading ships, it is much easier. But if you’re into the micromanagement, I suggest entering the city as soon as your captain arrives at port; you’ll see a whole new set of screens showing up. You can manually set trading options, build and upgrade (if the port is under your control) ships and buildings. It feels like a whole different game.
The city view won’t take your breath away, but it’s always fun to watch a city filled with various people going about their respective animations and so on. Nitro Games appoached the game from this angle, lowering textures and adding many NPCs with their own animations, rather than puttig up a few shiny buildings. And the same goes for the battle mode, which was included on the preview version.
The battle mode is somewhat fun and tedious at the same time. With the wind playing a strong variable in the battle system, ships can be either easily controlled or played against you so much that you don’t feel like you’re controlling the ship very much. And it simulates ship battles too well to the point where arcade-type fun are non-existent. Ships move very slow and you won’t see the results of the battle anytime soon.
But there are also interesting points to the ship battle systems. You start with an RTS mode, which follows the conservative style of RTS games. You can select and command them with your mouse. But the battle system doesn’t stop there; each captain also has special abilities that can be used during the battle, by pressing the number keys (or using mouse click) that correspond to a skill bar that you would commonly see on RPG or MMORPG games. Interesting. And even though you can enjoy the battle in RTS mode, you can also enter the Direct Command Mode, which gives you more control, as if you’re the captain of the ship that you selected. You can steer (though we had some problems), or you can even time when to shoot the cannons. Not bad at all.
Sounds like fun?
Well, it is, if you’re into this type of games. But without a detailed tutorial, it took us a lot of time to reach the point of having fun. And the same voice acting over and over isn’t too compelling either. The graphics might need some final tuning. And even though there are lots of fun elements into this one game, sometimes it feels like they need to harmonize these elements a bit better.
Luckily though, this was a preview version, before the official release, and the games usuall look much better after the finalization process. We (especially me) really look forward to playing the final release version, but at the same time, we really hope that the game gets fine tuned before the release. This game will be very appealing to the trading-sims-with-RTS+RPG-battle-system gaming fans, but also to the general gaming audience who would like to learn to play this type of game.
