East India Company (PC)

A slight annoyances I had with ports however is that to go into the upgrade menu, you need to load a new screen, away from the strategic map, which breaks away from what feels as an otherwise seamless experience. My only critic might possibly be that in the long run the campaign mode can become a bit repetitive despite the diplomatic options and so on.

However, this wouldn't be a game about the East India Companies if this didn't involve some form of naval combat, be it against pirates out for your goods or rival companies out to ruin your business. After all, as you grow in power, begin to get hold of a few ports for your nation, it is only normal that a few of your rivals decide to take competition beyond the sales of trade goods as you suddenly find the likes of cutters and galleons getting in your ship's way. Sometimes, it'll just be pirates from the various pirate ports deciding your cargo hold looked nice. No matter which party is involved however, the result is pretty much simple as you enter a tactical battle. As such, you are faced with two choices: Auto-resolves, which result in the game auto-calculating the damage done to all involved ships and thus who gets to win the encounter, and manual battle which starts a real-time battle between both fleets.

In a manual battle, you are brought to a face-off, as both your and the enemy's ships are all positioned on the water and asre quite realistically rocked by the sea's waves. As such, however, gameplay is kind of a mix of realism and slight arcade action. I say arcade because each part of a ship is divided into hitpoint-numbered sections and many commanders will come with "special abilities" of their own, but also realism as you can manoeuvre a ship to hide within the deeper part of a wave, using the wave itself as cover from incoming cannonballs whose velocity is broken by the crashing waters. At the basic speed, it is thus a bit more slow and methodical than what most might be used to, but it can be greatly satisfying. One of my only complaints about combat encounter, however, is that escape is only possible if you play in manual mode. So auto-resolving encounters between light ships and larger warships is often a sure way to end in your lighter ships' demise unless you're very lucky. It is a solid and occasionally quite entertaining mode, especially once you start juggling with the ability to directly control some ships for even tighter control. A slight annoyance of tactical combat is that it seems to be resource intensive. Granted I played on full settings, but a combat with full fleets on both sides actually managed to make even my very own quad core computer with 4 gigs of ram slow down.

Multiplayer

East India Company has a bit of multiplayer. However, it focuses solely on deathmatches and some other objective based battles based upon a campaign's tactical battles, foregoing any of the campaign's trading and large scale strategic gameplay to focus only on ship to ship combats. While some may like this, those people who would have liked to play a multiplayer version of the campaign map might be disappointed.

Graphics

The graphics in East India Company are actually well done and do the job they're assigned. In campaign mode, they give the strategic view a form of "board game" look which I don't necessarily dislike and tactical combat is quite decently represented by great graphics, though possibly at the expense of them being quite resource intensive in the larger scale battles, which might displease some people.

Sound

Likewise, the audio of the game is decent. Some of the unit quotes becomes repetitive at times, but it isn't as bad as other games before. Though not spectacular or wow-inducing, it doesn't strike as horrible either.

A small DRM alert

I include this section because it is something which for many, will make or break a game. Notably that in East India Company's case, the games note only requires internet activation. Not only that, but you will even quite literally need to re-enter your cd-key every time you patch. So far, there doesn't seem to be anything else than this, but those who this could already be enough to turn off are now warned.

Final note

The small bit about DRM over, I found East India Company a decent game to play. It's not a masterpiece, but it still delivers a nice and solid experience. However, the hefty system requirements, in a market that saw almost more laptops sales than desktops in the recent years, are a bit of a turn-down which prevents me from giving it a better recommendation.