Commander: Conquest of the Americas Review

8.5

Review Score:

Commander: Conquest of the Americas is a new trading and naval battle simulator from developer Nitro Games, published by Paradox and set for release this week from the publisher Paradox. The basic premise of the game is to do what our ancestors did in the conquering of the Americas. The game boasts with such features as large naval battles, great trading mechanics and superb graphics that will give strategy gamers a new game to play deep into the night.

The game is set in the 16th century, in the time of the Great Westward Expansion of all of the great European super powers of the time. As one of the seven countries represented in the game, it is your job to establish a series of colonies in the new world, then to gain dominance for your country in military power and economic might to fuel the home world with precious resources and goods. You must use a combination of trading, diplomacy, and military might to gain a foothold in the new world and the game has many features to help you get this done.

One of the main concepts of the game is the trading of resources back to the homeland of your nation, achieved by establishing colonies in the new world to get a grab at the precious resources waiting there for you. The game uses a good concept of having certain places across the coast of the landmasses that you can place your colonies, so there can only be a limited number of colonies to be placed by all seven countries across the land in the game. From the cold clutches of the Hudson’s Bay in Canada, down to the tropical paradise of the Caribbean, and finally to the jungle forests of South America there’s a great selection of where you can place your colonies – and that decision is critical, as you have to take into account of how far it is from your home country and what type of resources that area has naturally for you to acquire and trade.

Once your colonies are down, it’s time for the player to set up trade routes with their Navy to get the cheaply harvested resources of the new world back to the homeland. With these trade routes, you will try to gain profits to fund further colonies and naval power. To make the process of setting up trade routes even easier is an in game system where you can set up automatic trade routes. This system lets you include up to five colonies in a route where at each stop you can have goods go on and off the ship in an easy to use interface that shows when you have made a mistake like adding to much or not offloading a resource, which is very helpful. I thought this feature made the game that much more enjoyable as you did not have to constantly be managing ships and the loading/unloading of their cargo when they land at a colonies port.

Each colony can also have structures built on it to increase morale in the colony, let you have more people, or even to refine different resources so that you can make a greater profit on them when traded and sold. Building all these structures can help to steadily increase profits as you can have more people, which will in turn produce more goods, and then set a tax rate to cover the recurring costs of the buildings themselves. What I did was  create a super colony where I shipped all of my resources there to refine and then have a huge trading system from there to my home world, which was fun to do and easier to protect with my military ships.

A main portion of the game is a system requires you have to please four advisors of your nation in the roles of a Royal Advisor, the Trade Advisor, a Military Advisor, and the Archbishop. These characters give you missions that coincide with their roles in an attempt to keep you on the course the homeworld wants you to take in the New World. These missions are all rather simple in nature, but help to keep you going in the right direction in your colonies. As the game goes on you will get to the point where you have four or five missions at a time and only be able to complete a few of them, so you will have to choose which advisors you will want to try and keep happy. Although, if  you anger all four of the advisors to breaking point, your title of commander of the colonies of the New World is revoked and the game is over, so you will want listen to at least one of the advisors to keep your job and keep them happy! Having this thought in the back of your mind is a gread incentive to keep trying to complete some of the missions. If you want to just have a game where you do not want to listen to the ranting of your advisors however, you can choose the free play mode that does not require you to do what they say and gives you more freedom you can rule the colonies in any way you desire.

The second largest aspect of the game is the military and naval battles, where you can have ship-to-ship battles with as large a skirmish as 15 vs. 15. You will have to build up your navy of military ships so that you can escort transports, patrol around your colonies from raiders, and to attack the colonies of your enemy nations. The home world is the only place where you start with a shipyard, but they can be built on your colonies and this is where you will build your navy. The game offers a great variety of different ships to choose from, and each ship can have up to three upgrade attached to it that gives it small boosts in areas such as speed and durability. You can also hire up to three officers for each ship that also increase certain stats but require an initial cost and a recurring cost over time, but the boosts are worth it to increase speed and power in the end as you will have an edge over your enemies.

The battles are fun as you set your ships up to broadside the enemy with your cannons and the experience is much like playing an RTS game with ships. The game offers two different ways to control how the battles: the first where you control all of the ships and set where they go and the strategy to kill the enemy, and the second is to have direct control of one ship and have the satisfaction of killing enemy vessels with your own cunning and split-second decision making. The naval battles can also become quick intricate as you try and micro manage each ship by the direction they are going and what ammo they are using to quickly and decisively demolish the enemy under your guns. The naval battles are fun and engaging, but with enough of a challenge to keep a strategic player satisfied with the battles themselves.

The game’s graphics were quite outstanding, a definite improvement on the older of the graphic system from East India Company. From the beautifully rendered water to the landscapes and foliage on the continents, the graphics were stupendous and felt like they fit really well alongside the gameplay. The user interface is quite straightforward and easy to use too, though maybe only for those gamers familiar with this genre. The placement of the interface was well positioned and is very easy to navigate.

Overall, I quite enjoyed the game, the fun trading aspects and engaging naval encounters keeping me entertained for hours as I tried to gain control of the New World with my great nation. The game offers deep strategy and tactics that many a strategy fans will be enjoying in the near future. Although sadly, they will have to do it alone as there is no multiplayer aspect to the game, but nonetheless, Commander: Conquest of the Americas is a great game and a perfect addition to the nice niche genre of trading games.

NXT Score: 8.5/10

Pros

• Automated trading system
• Huge 15-vs.-15 Naval battles
• Lots of fun and easy to play

Cons

• No multiplayer!
• You’ll often have too many missions from your Advisors and not enough time to finish them
• Slight learning curve if you’re new to this sort of game