American Conquest: Divided Nation is one such game. Despite a generally glowing preview we gave of the game late last year, we’d not seen a single development from the publisher regarding the game’s status, and just assumed that the project was released to the small niche that would lap it up. Then, completely out of the blue, a reviewable copy of the game shows up in the mailbox. Upon struggling to get the game to work and then play, we’re kind of puzzled as to why we’d be sent a copy of the game in the first place. You see, PALGN doesn’t really give top priority to PC gaming; we only really cover the big name titles, so why we’d be sent a niche strategy game is totally beyond us. Secondly, American Conquest: Divided Nation is painfully regressive, so we’re kind of wishing that we didn’t have to play it (lousy game droughts – Ed.).
You see, American Conquest: Divided Nation completely ignores the last five years worth of progression in the real time strategy genre. While the game can be applauded for covering ground that a lot of games have ignored (when was the last time you saw a game on the Texan War of Independence?), it doesn’t do it in a manner worthy of praise. The game is touted as a standalone add on pack, which does make it more accessible to gamers who’ve not been introduced to the series before, but lets the developer off the hook from making any vastly different changes to the underlying game engine.
The Confederates were expert dirt farmers
A number of diverse campaigns (Gettysburg, Shiloh, and the Alamo, for example) are available to play from the get-go, as well as a variety of random missions. The game is really broken up into two sub-games; the standard base/army building and resource management game (basically the standard RTS model), and the more strategic battlefield management game where you must command your vast (but unreplenishable) army to victory. American Conquest: Divided Nation has a steep learning curve – there’s no tutorial, and the manual serves more to confuse a player rather than assist in developing an understanding of the game’s mechanics. This doesn’t help when you consider that the game has a rather deep resource management side to it, not to mention the variety of troop formations, unit types and such that a player needs to have solid knowledge of before they can successfully engage the enemy. The game’s standard RTS side is a little more successful than the battlefield component, but the game doesn’t really differentiate itself from anything released in recent memory, and the differences between Divided Nation’s four factions are superficial at best.
Arguably the biggest problem with American Conquest: Divided Nation is the archaic engine that drives the experience. 2-D isometric real time strategy games have long been a memory of one’s younger days, but GSC Gameworld has seen fit to retain the style for the game. Not such a problem when you consider that they’re using upward of 30,000 units on screen at any one time (a trademark of GSC since Cossacks), but the game is severely limiting in terms of the ways it lets you view the battle, with just two camera modes available; very close and very far. The game is also capable of bringing any computer to its knees – our review machine is a very capable Athlon 3200 with an X800 Pro and 1.5GB of RAM, and it struggled to keep Divided Nation running smoothly. This was most apparent in the larger battlefield missions (especially Picket’s Charge), when the game would pause for periods of up to 20 seconds for no particular reason at all. It’s almost more enjoyable to just let the game play itself and sit back and watch, rather than attempting to interfere with the experience.
This is about the size of the lynch mob that shows up at Matt's house after a bad review
Despite PR boasting about hundreds of unit types, American Conquest: Divided Nation does very little to distinguish your troop types. With the large numbers of troops on screen, you’re more likely to see your armies as big gobs of blue or grey, rather than being able to pick out your generals and commanders and different infantry units. The sheer scale of the battles is impressive, but a lot of liberty has been taken with design to achieve this ambitious goal. The interface isn’t exactly accommodating of the large scale either – the game seems like it’d have been better executed as a purely turn based strategy game. Divided Nation’s aural experience is solid, featuring a variety of familiar wartime tunes that have been pulled straight out of Gettysburg, though the game has no voice work from your men or generals – something that the decade-old Sid Meier’s Gettysburg! did very well.
It’s very difficult to find a solid reason to recommend American Conquest: Divided Nation. The game’s mechanics are firmly entrenched in the past, and can’t even compete with Civil War games that are a decade old, let alone newer games from similar eras such as Age of Empires III. Seeing 30,000 troops rendered on a battlefield at one time is kind of impressive, but when a PC that has no trouble rendering the latest and greatest, most graphically intensive new releases struggles to run the game at a playable pace, the outlook isn’t particularly good. Add in a convoluted micromanagement system and a steep learning curve, and you’ll find it very hard to justify playing American Conquest: Divided Nation over the large number of much more satisfying strategy games available on the PC.
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