TOTAL WAR ATTILA FULL
TOTAL WAR ATTILA SERIES

A litany of small but active tribes occupy the interstitial spaces, cannibalizing each other and nipping impishly at the heels of the larger factions. To the east, the comparatively recumbent Sassanians lie within striking distance of Constantinopolis. To the north and northeast, perennial all-barbarian first-teamers the Vandals and Visigoths flee from the Huns' onslaught-straight into Roman territory.

The Roman Empire is in its death throes, bloated and harried even after being cleaved into Eastern and Western halves. Total War: Attila is centered on its turn-based Grand Campaign, a broad representation of the military situation Europe found itself in around 400 A.D. Finally, something to upend the dreary peace! In the beginning, there was 'interface.' And it was just OK. But someone playing Total War: Attila has more in common with the former-there's no fun in watching civilizations, to hear Paddy put it, 'float about as lonely as clouds, expanding across the map as imperceptibly as damp or mildew.' And so in that limited sense, the Huns are a welcome arrival to Total War's late antiquity. Probably less so to the Quadi and the Marcomanni. The sudden flurry of activity is a welcome change of pace to Fermor, a 20th-century student with wanderlust.

TOTAL WAR ATTILA FULL

'Everything starts changing place at full speed! Chaos!' 'And suddenly, at last something happens,' exclaims the polymath, invoking Attila and his horde with a slash of graphite through the Viennese classifieds. For Fermor's benefit, the older man sketches ancient civilization out on the back of his copy of the Neue Freie Presse-the Marcomanni tribe here, the Quadi there-little circles of semi-permanent existence alongside the Danube's sinuous line. He falls into conversation there-as Paddy is wont to do-about regional history with a local polymath. The Scourge of God, the very herald of the apocalypse, Attila the Hun.In his travelogue A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor describes a stopover at an inn along the Danube, en route to Istanbul in the winter of 1933. In the great steppes of Scythia, a vast and terrifying force gathers, led by a warrior king whose thirst for conquest is utterly unequalled. Desperate barbaric tribes rally against the ailing might of a dying and divided Roman empire the light of civilization gutters and dims. A time of famine, disease and war, where refugees in their thousands flee from a sweeping tide of destruction and death. Creative Assembly would probably be chuffed as well and the criticism of Rome II has hopefully been constructive, even if the press release makes Attila sound like a wholly destructive proposition.

TOTAL WAR ATTILA SERIES

I expect I won't be alone in waiting until release before allowing myself to believe in the best possible Total War again, but I'd be chuffed if the series returned to its former glory. There's enough that's unique about the Civil War situation to create something quite different to anything Creative Assembly have tackled before as well, not least of which is a very limited number of factions. When Jim and I discussed Rome II, I mentioned the American Civil War as a decent possibility for future Total War and I stand by that - a contained group of territories and a manageable timeframe could be interesting and a neat variation on Shogun's brand of conquest. I suppose a sweeping away of the remnants of the Roman Empire allows for some recycling of assets and strategic structure, as well as being potentially cathartic. It's not quite as distant as a sequel, either in terms of setting or release window (2015), as I imagined Creative Assembly might go for. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Attila will introduce new features, however, including 'advanced street-fighting, civilians, complete settlement destruction and dynamic fire that can rage across a city'.

A tighter focus in the campaign should allow for improvement of the core systems and an emphasis on the end of an era could make for a tidier thematic approach. The press release proclaims that the game will take 'players to the brink of the apocalypse', which brings all manner of remarks to mind regarding the direction Rome II took the series itself in, but there's reason to believe that Attila will be a move toward more fertile ground. Creative Assembly's next entry in its long-running strategy series will be Attila: Total War.

Total war attila