Total War – Alexander

TAKING OVER THE WORLD IS NEVER EASY.

$7.99 | feralinteractive.com THE THIRD ROME: Total War game to march onto the App Store puts you in the sandals of Alexander the not-yet-Great, and asks you to conquer the known world within a time limit. After all, if the real Alexander could do it by the time he was 32, you should be able to in 100 turns.

Apart from the constant fear of running out of time, little else has changed since the series’ previous iPad release. The turn-based gameplay has you manoeuver your armies and recruit new units to gain strategic advantage on a map. Bump into an opposing army, or lay siege to a city, and you’ll be dropped into the meat of the action — real-time battles in which you control individual regiments and generals in the kind of hacking and slashing that leaves few on the losing side still alive and with all their limbs.

The interface has been intelligently designed for a touchscreen, but without the responsiveness of mouse control, and a view that doesn’t zoom out far enough, your micromanagement of fighting units can, sadly, become a stop-start affair.

It’s hard, too — as if the plan was to add an extra difficulty level to the existing game that somehow got released as a standalone app instead. It doesn’t help that, instead of the kind of playable tutorial that helps you learn the game’s mechanics, you get a series of videos that someone looking for a quick game is unlikely to watch.

That’s a shame, as the 100-turn limit and its associated need to attack means this is a game ideally suited to flights, toddler naps and the dull bits in romantic comedies. Its conflicts are suitably epic, seeing so many units fighting at once is a fine display of recent iPads’ power — an Air or mini 2 is the oldest supported — while custom and one-off battles add longevity past the campaign. Sadly, the learning curve is likely to put off many people.

At the end of the day, it’s a classic series, classical setting, but way too hard.