Here's my thought about EW5. This is only MY OPINION so do not take it as a fact.
I will use emoji to show how I feel about each point that I discuss.
Here's a legend;
= Wow. That's so nice.
= Nice
= It's OK. But can still improve
= I am neutral
= That's bad
= Woah... I don't wanna see this again
Graphic
- The graphic is initially a disappointment but as you play the game for a while you'll get use to it. Now I am fine with the graphic. Well, my guess is that EasyTech wants to include many major historical figures and many of whom we do not even know how their faces exactly look like so (unlike modern generals in EW4 and WC3) it's troublesome to make a portraits of them and cartoonish graphic solves the problem.
- There are many unit skins and animations which greatly add the livelihood of the games. You can see things like Bismarck drinking beer, Nobunaga cutting apple, or Moctezuma getting hyped up after opening a chest containing gold.
Historical Accuracy - This is one of the most frequent complains about this game. Well, I think it's kinda our fault to expect that from EasyTech. If you are so sensitive on this aspect then you will be find yourself getting irritated again and again (from things like... Cleopatra in Industrial era, Italy belongs to Germany, Alexander fighting Xerxes, etc...). Yet, gameplay-wise, it does not compromise your experience at all. In fact, it improves the gameplay in many ways such as balancing or increasing nation that you can play (imagin that there were only few European powers in Gunpowder age).
Empire Mode- IMO, this is quite a nice thing to do while you are resting from your battle (campaign and conquest).
Campaign Mode
- Campaign mode is quite good in EW5. There are many objective types which make it interesting and the difficulty is about right.
Conquest Mode
- Too much repetition.
- Not challenging.
- Rewards are pointless toward endgame. (Normally Conquest is something for my generals to do after complete all campaigns)
- Feel good when see my nation flags expanding in a coherent manner (not with so many colors mixed up in EW4 and WC5).
- Feel annoyed when I capture enemy capitals 4-5 times then it moves to a far away city to be taken by another country which make it surrender and gives up to all cities around my path to that country.
Generals
- Nice to see many historical figures e.g. Alexander, Hunnibal, Attila, etc.
- Generals have a lot more depth here.
- There are way too few general skills if we do not count versions of the same skill (master/expert or XXX.commander) and those pseudo-skills (+ stat). However, combining with unit skill helps add variety.
- I do not like the fact that general's stat is classified into grades. With the stat gap being quite big, blue and grey generals (which are the mojority of the general pool) are automatically useless (or almost) after a while. Only few blue generals are good enough to be in the endgame line up and that is mainly because they are niche/situational or we do not have enough medal to buy purple/gold generals for all slots.
- I feel that this game emphasize too much on general to the point that normal units become insignificant. In campaign I rarely train any units at all and in conquest I only train infantry to be my cannon fodder.
AI Control
- This is the most annoying part of this game. It gives my kidney a pain to see AI controlling my team. I do imagine that invasions would be fun if I could have the control.
Resources
- There are many resources in EW5; medal, coin, literature, etc... but in the end you will find yourself with all resource at cap (except medal, of course). So now, it become pointless to consider about them at all since there is no way you can spend them.
- Medals can be grind by simply doing missions. So this is simply a wait game. It gives no incentive to play the game at all. After a hard conquest, I receive 100000coin and some other treasures... but hey... my investory is still showing the same numbers 300000coin and 999 of everything else. So what is the point of doing all this? I wish EasyTech will bring back the system that you can earn some medal from playing the game like in EW4 (or at least a mixed system).
Progressing
- The progress is difficult at first, especially when you do no have many choices of your generals. Yet it is absolutely possible to finish the game without IAP (but definitely not easy).
- Literature is needed for upgrading to the next era. I guess EasyTech put the requirement there to force you to spend sometime on each era. Since the people who started playing early on (including me) are forced to wait for an update so we do not have much problem with literature (almost had enough by the time the update came), we did not really feel the grind for literature thing. But from my experience, you can get quite a lot of literature from campaign missions and more from conquests (which you will need to do it for medal reward from achievement anyway) so that should be fine.
Overall
- I would say EW5 is a decent game with a lot of rooms for improvement. I can really see how good it would be if EasyTech put more effort on adding the detail.
PS: I give a
8/10 for this game in the poll thread.
= It's OK. But can still improve
= I am neutral
= That's bad
