In East India Company, players enjoy building the World’s most powerful trading empire and engaging in fierce battles in both single player and multiplayer modes. Players fight, manage and rule their trading empires from Europe to the Far East with eight nationalities to choose from: British, Dutch, French, Danish, Portuguese, Swedish, Italian or Spanish. Starting modestly, you build your fleet, establish connections to far away countries, and keep rival nations at bay. Choose from a wide array of ship classes, including a variety of transport and military vessels. Create diverse fleets and assign each of them specific trading routes. Control and upgrade well situated ports as you form your strategy for domination. Conflicts and wars are inevitable. When hostile fleets engage each other, the spectacular naval battles are fought on a real-time tactical level. Devastating broadsides are fired with a deafening roar and cannon balls tear through enemy ships and their crew. For greater tactical depth, you can, at any point, take direct command of any of your ships and feel the battle close up! Fight against the other European powers to create a trading empire that will rule above all others in this groundbreaking strategy game.


Gameplay

In East India Company you are charged with making an obscene amount of money and destroying all those who get in your way. This is basically the same premise of all other war games but that is not a bad thing because the tried and true often works. You will engage in sea battles more and more as the game progresses because in every game it seems military power is the only way to beat the game instead of winning by other means.

You will trade goods from Africa, the Middle-East and of course India and on top of that you can capture port cities while you compete against the other European traders. The majority of your time will be spent dealing with the overhead map watching little icons travel across the screen from port to port. It would have been very nice to see a bit more interaction or detail in this map such as more graphic details or the ability to do detail zoom in and out, not just the basic zoom we have.

You will build ships and fleets to sail across the map which for the most part is simple and straight forward, but when you have to be diplomatic there is an obvious influence from one of the best games of all time Civilization, just without the flair and animation we are used to.

Ship to ship combat is slow, bulky and aggravating. Your ships bob across the waves in a slow pace, firing at a very slow rate at other ships. The combat is very slow and not exciting at all and it reminds me of two old men who try and beat each other with sticks, filmed and played back in slow motion. This might sound harsh but there are much better games this game is competing and it just does not work.

The game hits a massive miss-step with multiplayer because it only allows you to deal with ship to ship combat and not the rest of the game. The game would actually be more fun if you could play against other players the same way you play the single player game but with only the slow and boring ship to ship combat to satisfy the multiplayer gamers’, East India Company dropped the ball once again.


Graphics and Audio

Two of the bright spots of East India Company are the graphics and audio, which for the most part are well done. Nice details on ships, maps and videos make the overall graphical presentation fun and well deserved of an above average score but where the game falters graphically is the user interface which is a clunky and aggravating test of a gamer’s patience. As a fan of war games like East India Company and the obvious influence from other successful games in the same genre out on the PC market to have an interface like this is mind boggling.

There are some small graphic issues with the actual game such as during ship combat you will see these massive waves rolling across the screen which are huge in size compared to the ships on screen. It is a bit disconcerting when the ships bob up and down so much that if it were real the ships would be throwing people over board and causing severe damage.

Audio wise the game is good with nice music and sound effects for the most part. The games audio does a good job but does not take chances where it needs to it just makes due. This is not a bad thing but sometimes taking a chance would have made the game better.


Value

Sadly I have to say the overall value in the game is low. The bad outweighs the good on every level of the game and those few bright spots do nothing more than make you feel sad that the game did not reach its full potential. The single player and multiplayer side of East India Company is a bust in the end.


Bottom Line

While fans of the genre will find the game fun those purists who need a lot of beef on their gaming bone will find this game lacking immensely and head to other games with more features and better gameplay. This is only a buy if you have played other Empire games to death and need something new to play.