It’s said that history is written by the victors, but in the case of the Norman invasion of Britain, almost a thousand years ago, it seems we haven’t really forgotten what happened - despite the Brits being on the losing side.
Therefore, it feels a little odd taking the side of the enemy and invading your own country. It’s not a big deal, and no games really bother to release localised versions depending on which side of a war your country was on. But it does make it a little hard to empathise with your own army in AD 1066, knowing you’re possibly trouncing the digital representation of your own ancestors.
But I digress. The theme is the war leading up to the Battle of Hastings. For more info on that saga, see the Bayeux Tapestry. Suffice to say you’re a bloke called Norman (not really), and you’ve got an arrow in your quiver for the eye of Harold Godwinson, but first you’ve got to get your Anglo-Saxon Army to Senlac Hill for the decisive battle.
The trick with all good turn-based strategy games is simplicity. If each choice is like an entire game of chess, the game’s momentum (which is generally quite precarious in this genre anyway) crawls to a pace that makes it difficult to maintain interest.
But you also need to feel fully in control of your army, and that means the game must provide enough options to enable your decisions to come to fruition.
AD 1066 feels much like the excellent Advance Wars: Dual Strike on the DS, as it seems to almost predict your requirements and provides a small but accurate array of options for each unit at every turn.
Access to these options is easy, and although the game transparently coaxes the campaign in a specific direction at every stage, it never feels as though control has been taken from you - your decisions guide the course of the Norman conquest from beginning to end.
Cavalry, archers and infantry are at your command, and the tactics you use to punch through the English defences rely heavily on an understanding of which unit to use against each aspect of the enemy’s army.
Another easily overlooked element of a strategy game is the visual and audio styling. True enough, these aren’t overly important factors, and their prowess alone does not make for a good strategy game. But careful consideration about their design is what pulls you into the historical period, and here AD 1066 is found wanting.
The graphics manage to capture the rough essence of the time period, mainly through providing lots of fields to fight in, but extra diversity in the scenery would have helped bring mediaeval England to life a bit more, and brought the game away from the underlying appearance of a lacklustre game of Risk.
Equally, the audio is very sparse, without much in the way of battle cries or the clash of weapons to indicate that a fight is actually underway.
Because it suffers from its uninspiring presentation, AD 1066 has only its gameplay to sell it, but that’s still of sufficient quality to land it a bronze award. With a bit more flavour this could easily have turned into a silver, but strategy fans still have a formidable new enemy to conquer.
AD 1066
Playing a historical battle from the other side is an interesting experience, and lends a new angle to the strategic requirements of the Norman invasion. Let down by a lack of zest in its production, AD 1066 still manages to pull off an accessible and very playable – if austere – strategy game
Spanner Spencer
Yes. Spanner's his real name, and he's already heard that joke you just thought of. Although Spanner's not very good, he's quite fast, and that seems to be enough to keep him in a regular supply of free games and away from the depressing world of real work.