RTS strategies have always been a challenge for themselves. XIII Century: Death or Glory is no exception. First-time developer Unicorn Games Studios has put together a challenging historical warfare simulation with outstanding depth that will put your warfare skills to their limits. Unicorn Studios decides to focus on a single century and a couple of nations in that time who were known by their fierce armies. There are five campaigns here, each of which focuses on a series of battles for a single nation, the English, French, German, Russians, and Mongolians. Depending the nations you select, that is the campaign, you will be fighting battles from history for which some records exist and it will be simulated as similar as the data goes. As you complete these battles, you'll unlock additional bonus battles that you can play as one-offs. But after that you will notice that almost every battle in the game is a stand-alone battle as the game provides none or a minimum story detail. As the battles are a match for themselves, you have the possibility to create your own custom battles by your desires. There's also a multiplayer option but it currently only supports direct IP connections, so there's really not much chance of building much community here. XIII Century: Death or Glory follows the standard rock-paper-scissors approach that should be familiar to anyone who plays medieval war-games; cavalry beat your archers, archers beat your infantry, swordsmen beat your spearmen and spearmen beat your cavalry. One of the great things about the game is the details that you must be aware that concern your troops and your enemy troops, like: Units suffer from fatigue if marched too far too quickly and they lose morale when their flanks aren't protected; every single detail of an battle such as weapons, terrain, discipline, etc…can be accessed by simply hovering your mouse over any of the units in the formation. When you line up the formation of your army, they are split up in different groups. These groups can only contain soldiers of a single type that is; there can’t be any mixing between soldier ranks. Clicking on a certain group displays any information that is important in a small frame on the interface in the bottom of the screen. And while you can opt to see the destination of any single unit, there's no option to show the final positions of all your moving units at once, causing the lineup of the formation being sometimes very stressful. Like in every battle a good strategist always watches out for the conditions on the battle field, that is how they can affect the outcome of the battle. That one of the huge factors in the game you must watch out for, as it can mean a definite win for you, or complete slaughter of an entire unit, if not an army. Perhaps one of the best things about this game is that the AI seems to really understand how to play both fairly and intelligently. The AI of the game will stop at nothing to find any weakness in your formation and strategy and it will use it the best way that it can to make as much as damage possible. Underestimating the game will result in your definite defeat. The units themselves look pretty good and the land is convincing enough to give a real sense of place to the battles. There won’t be hundreds of archers that look completely the same. In fact there will be multiple faces of different personalities, which give the additional effect of great graphics. What is surprisingly good about the game is that the sound that is made during the gameplay. The game won’t certainly disappoint you, the only glitches of the game that show up from time to time is during a great battle with large number of soldiers involved. All in all a game that must be played by all the RTS fans at least.
