American Conquest: Divided Nation
The last in our American Conquest trio is American Conquest: Divided Nation and this, sadly, is the weakest game of the lot. Released back in March this year, you’ve got to wonder if this was a project intended for release a few years ago but was shelved and has now been given a dust off for some reason. I can forgive the old fashioned isometric fixed view of the previous two games, they’re a few years old now, but this is a 2006 release… oh dear.
This time around, as the Divided Nation name suggests, the action focuses on all the fisticuffs that occurred as the various American states tried to figure out if they wanted to be part of a union or if slavery was a good idea after all. Still in evidence are the simply massive battles with thousands of units all giving each other a damn good thrashing and it always warms the heart to see American knocking six bells out of each other.
Click for larger imageBut aside from that, for a recent release, Divided Nation appears to have had very little in the way of modernisation from the original games in this pack. In fact, I’m willing to bet that if I hadn’t have told you Divided Nation was released this year, you would’ve thought it was from the same era as the other two. You may feel I’m being overly harsh here, but I was making allowances for the age of the other games and it’s fair to assume that GSC might have done something with the game engine in the intervening few years, yes?
So we’ve still got the same engine with the same problems. The AI takes a wander off and the two zoom levels make it bloody hard to see them from far off as they’re too small and even harder to see them close up as you’re too far in. The graphics are now looking very dated, even though they’re as near as makes no difference identical to the other games in this pack. In fact, if anything, Divided Nations is worse as the graphics engine now has weird scenery blips and clipping issues…
Click for larger imageSo as part of a trio of games, Divided Nation is the one to avoid… or just kid yourself into believing that this is a couple of years old and released when the others were out, then you’ll be fine.