Recent reviews by Compost in Training

Up front I'm going to just give this game a 7/10 in case you dont care about the reasoning.

PROs B====D

-This game is optimized?????????? I have a pretty dated system. i5 8gb 1600 ram, 660 2gb and I run this game on high (with unit sizes in ultra) at about 40 fps. That's awesome.

-Lore is nearly perfect. They capture the fasntasy universe like no game has done before.

-Sound. Everything sounds like it should. The rockets, monsters, and even the voice acting is great.

-AI is the best it's ever been. I cannot believe I am writing this in the pro section for a Total War game =)

-Visually this game is fantastic. Almost everything looks great. The only real issue is when it comes to city/village battles which I'll get to later in my cons list.

-Faction diversity. Each race plays very different from eachother. It also doesnt feel like arbitrary differences that hinder or buff things for no reason.

CONs B===D

-City battle suck huge balls. This is the biggest dissapointment. After all the awesome things they added in attilla to go back to shogun 1 style seige bettles is really really sad. The seiges have no depth at all, its one wall that you rush as many units at as possible. There are no tactics, just numbers. This is so disjointed from the rest of the game where AI has been buffed and tactics are really viable. It just makes no sense unless they rushed this part to get the game out.

-Village battles are nothing but regular battles. There are NO villages represented on the map at all in a village battle. Again this makes no sense whatsoever.

-Im not super upset by this next one but I know a lot of people are so I think I should include it. Combat animations suck. It's the old style "hacking at the air" animations from the pre Empire days.

Overall I'm stoked about this game. It's fun, it's accurate to the lore, and it's acctually challenging me for the first time since Rome. I just wish there weren't so many huge steps backwards for the gains. Seige battles are pathetic and animations really blow. Again 7/10

This is one of the most buggy games I have ever played. I cannpt go longer than 20 minutes without a crash and thats if it loads in at all. I pass the req specs by quite a bit so I don't think it's me. I cannot recommend this game in its current state.

*Update* I still have a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of crashes but I cant stop playing it anyway. The game is fun as hell and has some great mechanics but I still cannot recommend it to anyone until these issue go away.

I looked at the min specs last night and was pretty sad, I have a 660ti and thought "well I guess my card is officially opsolete". BUT I was really looking forward to this game and didn't really want to buy it on a console so I figured "if it looks like garbage I'll just return it."

So I installed it and ran it for the first time, saw the opening cinimatic and it looked amazing. I figured "must just be the cinimatics being prerendered or something." So it ended and the game started and it looked amazing, I checked my settings and everything was preset at Ultra!!! I am blown away with the optimization of this port. I am consistantly at 60FPS and running at 1440P with Ultra settings on a card this old is just awesome!

I only have a little bit of time in the game so I don't want to say much else about it yet other than so far the game is very fun and that the hand to hand sounds absolutely brutal (as it should). In fact, the sound in general is very nice so far.

I will update this review after I am further along and can speak more on the gameplay aspects.

Let me start by saying that I have owned every single Total War game since the first shogun and have been playing these games since I was 10 years old. That being said, I think this is the freshest Total War game in a long while.

The Ai is the smartest in the series thus far, it will flank, it will outmaneuver you on the campaign map and it will kick you around if you are not paying attention. The best part is that the AI will no longer sit by as you rain death upon them with ranged units (usually). It is still not perfect however, they will still do stupid things every once and a while, like build an army with 10 war dogs units or put their siege engine in a stupid place. I have also noticed that for the first time ever, I have seen the AI take a lot of Mercenary units to flush out its ranks.

Where this game really shines is in the sieges, they are beautiful. Fires destroy whole villages, smoke effects are top notch, and projectiles look incredible for the first time in series history. The AI also shines here, using choke points and barricades to beat me up and keeping ranged units in just the right places to fire on me.

I have always found myself becoming bored with the battles in other Total War games after about 40-50 turns and using auto-resolve whenever I didn't need to fight a close battle because they all started to blend together and loose the excitement. This has not been the case in Attila. Every fight feels fresh, each encounter I feel challenged, and I often found myself being emerged in the battles in a way I never had before. There is a strange cinematic experience in Attila that has not been there since the first Shogun and Medieval, I am not sure if it is the AI, the graphics, or the sense of desperation in every move that gives it what so many of the recent games have been lacking but I am glad it's back and I hope it is here to stay.

When you win that battle there are now several options for what to do with the newly taken settlement. Most talked about is the ability to destroy settlements, this removes them from the map and leaves a little marker where the settlement was. You will gain some cash from this as well as food. Be warned however, rebuilding settlements is extremely expensive, a small lvl 2 town was going to cost me 13,000 cash and 600 soldiers to rebuild. One of the lesser publicized features is the ability to pillage settlements. This will damage all the buildings, and give you some cash but leave the city in the control of the other faction. This is useful for when you send a small army (or navy!) to attack an unprotected settlement but don't have the army to fend off the attack yet. Then you have the pillage and settle option which is a combo of the settle and pillage actions, meaning you damage all the buildings and get a lot of cash but also settle the town. Last you have the regular settle and subjugate options.

Winter is coming. Winter will kill men if you get caught without protection, the attrition is pretty steep and I love it.

City management is improved here too, all city’s (villages, towns, ect.) can have a governor who will both act as a general if the city is invaded (using the garrison troops) as well as allow you to place edicts on individual towns. This makes owning one piece of a region a lot more bearable, and doesn't force you to invade people just for that extra bonus.

I am trying to keep myself from getting to excited from this game, I really do love it but I also don't want to seem too fanboyish. I am just extremely happy to have a very good Total War game for the first time in a while. As of this moment I don't want to give a score of the game, I will save that for my first update after I have many more hours in game. I will say that if you are a fan of the series and you are worried about another Rome II, don't this is everything Rome II should have been.

I will keep this review up to date for at least the next few weeks incase something crazy comes up and ruins the game.

Let me start by saying that I have been following this game from the beginning as a backer. To put this simply, I would not recommend this game in it's current state (release build 71544). To call this a final game is absurd and borderline insulting. Features are missing or not flushed out at all and I don’t just mean I don't like them. For example:

There is no way to play this game in offline mode. This was promised from the beginning to be included "When the game is released". They lied. Also You cannot save a game so either be prepared to spend at very least 30 minutes of uninterrupted time on here or waste it when you have something unexpected happen.

Single player is useless, boring, and flavorless. Many of the games only redeeming features are not even included with galactic campaign, no super weapons here folks. And maybe I am in the minority here but I like singleplayer usually, there just isn't anything worth playing.

The games are hard to follow after you leave your first planet. Most of the time will be spent navigating the UI trying to make sense of the battle while you literally leave your other forces idle.

OPTOMIZATION is nonexistent. I have a high end rig for windows and a top line IMac and neither of them can run this game without major lag, graphical tears, or in many cases crashes/screen blackouts. This is acceptable for a beta but not a final release. And honestly the graphics are pretty boring to look at and I'm a fan of the cell shaded/cartoon look but somehow they managed to make that dull and not vibrant.

There are some small gripes I have with the game as well. First is the lack of "flavor". I feel like all the units are so bland and basic, and to make it worse everyone is using the same ones. I wish there was some way of differentiating the units per leader, or even take some cues from the terrible single player and limit the techs for each player to 3 or 4 cards to make games more exciting. That brings me to my last little gripe, bots vs land vehicles. There is almost no difference between the two gameplay wise, honestly what’s the point, maybe I am missing something here?

So unless something drastic changes don't waste your time or money on this game, I know I wish I hadn't.

My internet connection at time of review was roughly 7mb down 2-3 up, actual. Best I can afford and I would say better than avarage. Note: This is my actual number not the "estimate" that providers give you. (Welp, I'm an idiot. Actual numbers are 31 down, 12 up.)

I will Update the review if anything changes.

(UPDATE Oct. 7th)

They have announced a patch coming Oct. 9th that will bring offline play. I will be testing it out and update the review accordingly.

(UPDATE Oct. 10th RELEASE BUILD 73737)

So far with the update they made adding offline support everything has been going smoothly (at least as much as before). There are still plenty of major bugs that can be really frustrating and even make the game unplayable at times. I am glad that so far they have stuck with PA and turned out this update. As of right now I still cannot reccommend the game, however.

Some people have complained that my review doesn't take multiplayer into account much and honestly they are right. I dont like multiplayer in games like this, it all comes down to who can click faster. I thought it was pretty clear from my statments that this review is more for singleplayer or casual multiplayer people. Also once you are entreanched in seperate planets there is really no way to invade eachother so it ends up being who can make the most nukes first (or activate the deathstar-esc metal planet).

I really hope this game grows on me, I love the concept, I also really want to back their new project Human Resources but I think I will hold off since this game left such a bad taste in my mouth, not only for Uber but Kickstarter in general (Kickstarters really dont have to provide the product to you at all, and that breaks no kickstarter rules).