Rise of Prussia, Fredericus Rex

Total score
Game play
Nuts & bolts
Bells & whistles	N/A

This review is based on a complementary review copy – I did not pay for this game.

Review copies

After the disaster that was Ageod’s WWI game I was reluctant to go back to Ageod for more. I didn’t pre-order Rise of Prussia though I otherwise might have, and posted my reasons why on Usenet:

>> First Ageod game I won't be preordering, well done
>> Ageod.
>
> How so?
>

All old news.  Mostly the awful, awful WWI. And I know it's a different engine, but ageod still published it, and what's more now they have paradox as an owner, with their famously mad skillz with a debugger and solid track
record of half finished products. Old, sad news.

For whatever reason after I wrote that Ageod got in contact with me and offered me a review copy of the game. (Going some way to proving the whole squeaky wheel adage I suppose.) Whatever the reasoning was I’m grateful any way.

And the game?

The game itself is … good, but not great. Don’t get me wrong, it is in no way as bad as WWI, that game was a dog. This game is good. It’s just not great.

To my mind the game sits somewhere between Ageod’s Napoleon's Campaigns and Birth of America in rank. It’s better than Napoleon, but still not anywhere near as good a game as Birth of America (a game which was after all very, very good).

Some of the reasons for my ranking are possibly obvious at first glance: the unit count and the map’s size have shrunk down again, which is good, and the strange unit-pictures-on-a-stick unit counters that spoiled the Napoleonic game by making it pretty much impossible to tell where a unit was are also thankfully gone again. In their place are the solid unit markers of the original game, but the map is still not as good as it originally was, once again it’s the garish green of the Napoleonic map, against which it’s very hard to see units especially when the map’s zoomed out. I miss the understated tones of Birth of America’s map - that map was beautiful.

Some of my reasons for saying the game isn’t great (though still good I hasten to add) are rather less tangible than its colour scheme. I’m not that familiar with the period. I’ve read a few books, and I’ve even been to Frederick’s grave where I got to ask about the local custom of leaving potatoes (turns out he introduced the potato to Prussia, who knew), but it’s really not my speciality. So while I feel like a bit of a dilettante this far from WW2 I still feel qualified enough to say that for me the game just didn’t capture the feel of the campaign. But I’m also happy to admit that maybe I’m wrong about that.

Underpinning my feelings are an accumulation of little things, not any one big or obvious problem; like having areas in Eastern Europe labelled as “wilderness”, a description that makes good sense in colonial America but rather less sense in the Europe of the Seven Years War. Or of having faceless commanders for just a few too many of the units. Or indeed of the game art just not being as good generally as it was in the original game.

Along with a few minor bugs in the scenarios – eg Browne gets replaced as commander, but there he stays, his counter right next to his replacement’s – a game that could still be a great entry point into a little enough covered period of history fell a little flat for me. I just never got enough of a feeling that Prussia needed to go for the quick kill all the time or else be overwhelmed in this game. Prussia’s position only ever seemed about as precarious as everybody else’s.

Possibly that’s because while there’s plenty of content it all felt a little bit the same. To me any way. The game comes with a campaign, in fact six versions of the campaign that start in different years and run till 63, and one introductory & three tutorial scenarios. (Essentially the campaigns are it.) Plenty of content to deal with, but  there’s no good explanation of why powers came in & out of the game at specific times, nor why starting in one year should be significantly different to any other. Leaders & allies appeared and disappeared on scripted queue, stuff certainly happened, but I was often left not feeling sure why it had happened. If there was a reason. There are very brief potted histories, but there’s just not enough context for anything. For me. Seven Year War buffs may well beg to differ, and I’d bow to their (or your) experience on this.

Play is pretty much the same as before. There are a few teaks: There’s a slightly different unit building system to the earlier games (it’s drag an available type onto a suitable area now), and there’s a detailed unit by unit combat result that you can drill down into, but overall play feels much the same as it did in the earlier games. After WWI that may well be a good thing, just don’t expect any new features to get excited about. And new & exciting stuff would be required to justify more stars.

Nuts & bolts

The game’s solid. Ageod’s Athena game engine stands in marked contrast to their rather shabby WWI engine. The smaller map loads and scrolls faster too, especially compared for example  to the American Civil War map. Much faster.

It’s not perfect of course, but the only two software bugs (as opposed to scenario design bugs) I saw were: the update link in the quick start program – which I think is a Paradox thing – didn’t link to any file, and clicking on the screen while a battle’s being resolved gives a blank screen till the end of the battle. That second bug may have always been there, but I haven’t noticed it in any of the earlier games. Small potatoes any way.

The manual

Paradox may indeed have had some influence here, but if they did it wasn’t in the negative direction I’d expected. The manual is noticeably better than the Ageod manuals of old. Whether that was down to Paradox, or Gamersgate, or somebody else, a native English speaker at least seems to have seen this manual before it got published. Which definitely didn’t seem to be the case before.

All the old strange half-English language constructs are gone from the docs, or were as far as I could see, though they persisted in minor ways in the game itself (care to ‘knock a hard blow to Austria’, or see troops ‘trained with success’ or ‘use all the ammunition around’?). That’s minor.

More importantly, while there was a lot of time spent explaining concepts that should be readily familiar to anyone who’s ever played any earlier Ageod game, or probably most any other computer wargame, there wasn’t enough detail about the specifics of how particular combat mechanics and abilities work. That’s possibly just me carping though, in an age of awful manuals this manual, while by no means perfect, is one of the better ones I’ve seen in any game lately.

All in all

I don’t know if I’ll pre-order the next Ageod game. I suppose that would depend on the topic. This game is a welcome return to form for Ageod though, and certainly would help make my decision easier.

If you’re interested in the period you can safely buy this game. Ignore my earlier fears based on Ageod’s WWI game, I’ve been proved wrong on that at least.

(Just don’t get me started on the ‘gold version’ of WWI, which will be on sale before the original edition works. Blah.)