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Genre: Real Time Strategy

Format: DVD

Developer: Pyro Studios

Mac Port: Robosoft Technologies

Publisher: Feral

Minimum System Requirements: Mac OS X v10.4, 1.67GHz G4/Intel Mac, 512MB RAM, 64MB video card, 4GB hard disk space, DVD drive

Review Computer: 1.8GHz G5 iMac 17", 512MB RAM, Nvidia GeForce FX 5200, Mac OS X v10.4.2

Network Feature: No

Processor Compatibility Universal

Price: $39.95

ESRB Rating: T

Availability: Now

Official Website: www.imperialglory.com

Imperial Glory is the Ginsu knife set of turn-based world-conquest gaming: an expansive and ponderous computerized world conquest simulation designed for the enthusiastic turn-based gamer. If six knives are not enough for you, you buy 36. If one game is not enough, you buy Imperial Glory. Suddenly, you have a range of games that meets your needs, and are free to use or ignore them as you desire. Feature-packed and detailed, but complex beyond the interest of the average gamer, Imperial Glory has a depth and scope that exceeds other turn-based role playing games, and can not only be played but also enjoyed as games within a game.

The first level of involvement comes in learning the basics of land battle. Like the paring knife of battle games, you are given soldiers who have certain advantages and disadvantages and seem to be historically accurate. Over time, they can advance with experience and be given reinforcements to improve their success rate. But this is basic and accepted. The butcher knife is mastering formations and movement. It is a bit non-intuitive, but improves over time and indeed makes your work go much quicker. Troop advantages play out rather quickly, so disadvantaged troops will be summarily slaughtered. Disadvantages can come from type and speed of troops, weaponry, and the utilization of surrounding features, including topography and buildings. Here's that underutilized 36th knife that does not appear in other games: you can enter a building and gain a strategic advantage. This level of realism was refreshing, and a good outflanking that landed my otherwise disadvantaged troops bunkered in a barn allowed me to win a land battle against long odds.

You can also work on your seafaring. This filet knife is useful as your empire grows; the need to master the seas increases so you can defend and expand your territory. I confess that, despite spending a great deal of time playing in preparation for this review, I had difficulty mastering this aspect of the game. Perhaps due to my lack of enthusiasm for water battles, I almost always chose to let the computer fight these for me, making sure that I provided superior force for each confrontation. One aspect of the sea confrontations that I found useful was the ability to change the type of weaponry used in the battle. Instead of merely cannonballing the other ship into a pile of wreckage, a captain could opt to use grapeshot. This targets the sailors without doing significant damage to the ship, allowing you to commandeer additional ships rather than having to build an entire fleet from scratch.

Those "games within a game" each provided hours of engaging gameplay, but they are not the purpose. Like a Ginsu infomercial, Imperial Glory offers more. The full game is Risk on steroids. Territories including all of Europe and Russia and extending into northern Africa are part of the scope of this game. Again, there are the familiar trappings of other games in this genre: resource development, a lengthy research tree, and the ability to win friends and influence countries. A wide range of options are available to you and your opponents on each move. How you spend and gather resources, what sorts of buildings you develop, which step you take in the resource tree and other decisions are similar to the games you have played before (if you have read this far into the review, I'm sure you have played similar games before.) However, I have never played a game with so many choices available. And as your empire grows, you must make these choices within each of your territories. Given that England, France, and other major countries each have several territories within them, you see that this can get complex, like scattering your Ginsu knives in your utility drawer then trying to pick the best one for the job at hand.

Among the options available to you and your computer opponents are the ability to trade resources for cash or vice-versa, to make defensive and offensive treaties against other countries or empires, or to simply negotiate the right of passage to get to a country that you intend to invade or occupy. But a siege takes time, and countries fight back, and you must learn to counter their efforts through force and secret societies. Symbols will appear over foreign capitals showing their alliances, and then flags will appear indicating resistance to your occupation—even after you were sure you had put them down once and for all. Suddenly you have left a single ship alone at the edge of the ocean and he is taken by the enemy, and the general you just sent in to battle had only a small hand combat force instead of a range of troops to get the job done. Meanwhile, your opponents are making their own treaties and alliances, and your standing in the world (detailed near the top of the screen throughout gameplay) ironically dips even as friendly countries choose to be annexed to your growing empire.

If the description leaves you a bit breathless, well, that's how it is. I spent hours and hours trying to master the complexities and still found myself sometimes forgetting the need to be near a friendly port to repair my ships or to board troops, or completely unaware of why there were banners throughout a previously defeated country and I could not get the port there to do what I asked. The manual lacked answers to some of these questions. Other answers were found buried in seemingly unrelated areas, so scouring it proved useful.

Oddly, I would improve this game by making it somewhat more complex: allowing the option to place certain improvements in all of my territories instead of just one at a time, setting long-term destinations for my troops and ships so that I would not have to remember to move them one territory each turn, and improving the menu when an item was right clicked so that it provided more information relevant to the game. I guess this sounds like improving your Ginsu knife set by adding knives, but I think it's the opposite, allowing some of the knives to do the work for you (which really sucks as an analogy, and I'm sorry for that, but there it is). Additionally I would change the research tree as well. Currently, and inexplicably, you must complete all of the upgrades in a certain era to advance to the next. Coupled with the fact that each research step takes a specified number of moves, it was impossible to gain a tactical advantage over your opponents other than in resource acquisition and management. One could not become an agrarian society and flourish by feeding the roughest warlike empire in the area, or focus their entire might on one aspect of development to the exclusion of others. This makes sense on some levels, but takes away the opportunity to further customize the strategy to your own way of thinking.

I mentioned early on that Imperial Glory is ponderous. Screen upload times—for instance, in the transition from the Risk-style world map to a land battle—were frustratingly long. I found myself thinking of short errands to run in the house (water the plant by the window, feed the fish, pour a drink) during these transitions. Computer turns also took a while, especially early on when there were 20 independent empires each seemingly wondering what move was best. This made sense when troop movement was involved—seeing the movement was crucial to understanding what was going on and defending your own territory—but tactical decisions could be made entirely behind the scenes during gameplay since you could not interfere with them anyway. As the game went on, I periodically invaded a country for the sake of speeding up turns. I am now somewhat sympathetic to one aspect of tyranny: there is a certain efficiency to running everything yourself. Also, Imperial Glory is not really a video game. Though graphics are an important representative part of the battle scenes, it is not nearly as realized as Age of Empires or even Myth, so a thirst for realistic blood will be better quenched elsewhere.

If you like your games to be complex and involved, taking weeks to complete scenarios and testing a broad range of intellectual skills—including planning movement and simple tenacity—Imperial Glory is your next purchase. Offering dizzying levels of complexity and detail, it can absorb hours of your time and attention. However, the gameplay distractions, such as screen download and turn times, and the sheer quantity of decisions that need to be made on each turn, might be a real turn-off to some. For the simple game, I suggest you buy two good Henkel paring knives, a solid butcher-style knife, a bread knife, a set of steak knives for your guests, and Age of Empires III. For the full time chef-gamer, go Ginsu and purchase Imperial Glory.

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