East India Company Review: Trouble On The High Seas

Paradox Interactive is well-known for tackling the strategy genre with niche themes, so it comes no surprise that they decided to make a game based around the East India Companies. Like any other strategy game, you’ll need to deal with diplomacy, budget, and fleet and commander management. It’s similar to other strategy games you may have enjoyed, only with an extremely heavy emphasis on the high seas. While this might all sound all well and good, is it ready to conquer the strategy world?

“East India Company” places you as the Governor General of one of the seven European nations in the 17th century. Your job is to make your country strive by exploiting the resources and population of both Africa and India. For this to happen, you will be given tasks by your superiors who will reward you with more power. Failure to do so results in you losing your position as well as jeopardizing the state of your nation.

Like any credible strategy game, “EIC” comes with a tutorial to show you the ropes around the interface as well as the game itself. You’ll learn how to navigate the interface, learn about three views, and get a small sample of naval combat. The problem with the tutorial is it’s mostly text-based and filled with typos. It is also not scripted very well as there were several occasions I had to restart the tutorial because I wasn’t following the “proper steps” despite following the instructions.

Unfortunately, the problems don’t stop with the tutorial. Once you make your way into the gameplay of “EIC” you’ll quickly realize that there isn’t much player involvement. The game is entirely based around the known-world map strategic view, where you can see the ships zipping along the oceans. This is the screen where you will give orders to your fleets as well as influence their engagement policies. For example, you can have one strong fleet patrol the area and engage with any hostile nations, and another to perform a certain trade route. The entire problem with “EIC” is that everything is automated. When you set up a trade route, the ship does it’s thing by going to the port, buying some goods, and going back to your port to sell them. When you patrol your ship to engage, it moves around in an automated pattern and engages others on its own. All you really do as the player is set up the policies of your fleets, and wait for something to happen.

It even fails to use its own historical setting properly. While it could have taken advantage of the vast intricacies of colonial times, the game is simply based around foreign ports in India and Africa. You will be not using political clout in Europe, or colonial frictions in Africa, and not even using the locals in India. All you are doing is taking over ports, setting up routes, and creating engagement policies. It seems like a missed opportunity that can hopefully be built on in the future.

The naval combat is a miss as well: if you decide to automate the combat, you cannot loot and plunder, which is vital at the later stages of the game. When you decide to do it manually, you will need to be patient as the game is ridiculously slow paced and a two ship battle could take as long as ten minutes. There are settings for Naval Combat, such as Arcade, Normal, and Simulation, but they hardly improve the slow pacing of the combat.

Interface is very unintuitive as well, as you only have three modes to choose from: Port, Strategic, and Naval, and each one takes a bit of loading. While going from Strategic view to Naval Combat is understandable, since those are two completely different things, the biggest problem is going from Strategic to Port and back again. Why? Because the Port view is a very brief area where you will be building ships, setting up your leaders, and upgrading your ports. All of this is menu driven, and the background graphics do not play a part in this mode at all, which begs the question as to why couldn’t this be the “strategic” view instead? All it does is makes it a hassle to command your ports since you will be going from one loading screen to the next for a task that won’t even take 30 seconds of your time. It’s annoying.

Graphically the game isn’t that impressive either, especially since the Port view graphics look a decade old, and the naval combat isn’t all that interesting to look at either. The only part that looks decent for the genre is the Strategic View where you see subtle details on the land and ports themselves, but as hard as it tries, it’s just mediocre by strategy game standards. To make with it’s rather drab look, the performance isn’t all that well done either. For some reason the Strategic View chugs a computer that could run “Team Fortress 2″ and “Lord of the Rings Online” just fine, but the Naval Combat runs perfectly at 60 FPS.

In the end, “East India Company” just isn’t an enjoyable experience. The interface is unintuitive, the game is mainly automated, and “action” parts require you to be extremely patient. The only notable thing is the game is that it is easy to understand since there isn’t much to learn or master. It’s a very simple game that doesn’t take advantage of it’s own setting, and should not be recommended for fans of strategy games.

Rating:

 
“East India Company” was developed by Nitro Games, and published by Paradox Interactive for the PC. It was released on July 28, 2009.

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