Romance of the Three Kingdoms XIII

Based on the esteemed time-honoured novel of the same name (but without the XIII, naturally), Romance of the Three Kingdoms XIII is an historic military simulator that merges RPG elements with time management and real-time strategy. Set against the backdrop of the Three Kingdoms era, you must rule over armies of valiant warriors and rise up thriving communities from the dust in a ploy to unify the war-stricken plains of ancient China. With it's time-tested formula still well intact the franchise has marched its way onto the PS4, helping to fill the void of hardcore strategy games on the platform.

Hero mode is a much recommend but completely optional entry point for newcomers to the series. Acting as a structured story-driven tutorial, hero mode firmly grasps you by the hand and steadily guides you through the game's wealth of mechanics. Starting with young and courageous Liu Bei you progress your way across a timeline of key events that take place during the uprising of the Yellow Turban Rebellion. Here you'll have the opportunity to play as a diverse cast of characters hailing from the states of Wei, Shu and Wu. There is a nice blend of storytelling and hands-on action present, which prevents the mode from simply feeling like a tedious step by step tutorial.

Once you've got the basic principles covered you may feel prepared to take on the main mode. You start by selecting an officer from an array of characters and choose one of six time periods that you'd like to leave your mark upon. Offering much flexibility, there's also a range of parameters that you can tweak to tailor the game to your taste and overall skill level. These include the lifespan of your character, whether or not they can be slain in battle, and whether their behaviours stay true to those of their historical counterparts. The level of flexibility offered means that you can essentially construct a different game every time you play, allowing for plenty of hours of replayability. You can also create your own custom character through an intuitive selection of options that allow you to modify their own unique stats, personal traits and appearance.

The longstanding goal within the main campaign is to unify the whole of China, and as you may have guessed, this isn't a simple task. In order to reign victorious, your efforts outside of the battlefield must be met with equal attention. This involves training troops so that they are more proficient, forming alliances with neighbouring villages to boost morale, and improving fealty by patrolling around cities. Juggling these responsibilities and the many others required for a successful conquest can feel awfully daunting at first, but once you get a feel for maintaining a balance it's incredibly satisfying as there's multiple ways to carve a path to victory.

Before initiating an assault you can select which officers you would like to lead on the battlefield and what types of troops you'd like to deploy. When moving your army around the map (represented there as an avatar) and embarking on your attack you're restricted to sticking to linear pathways and you're are left with no choice but to scurry back to base if your troops exhaust their supplies. This strips you of any form of in-depth strategic planning when preparing an attack, besides being able to select a meeting point for your forces to align.

On the battlefield there are two main ways to secure victory; either by exterminating all opposing forces or by taking out your enemy's main stronghold. During these RTS battles you can destroy enemy bases to lower their morale and create weapons to defend the parameter of your outposts. Frame-rate hiccups often plagued the experience during large scale battles, and introducing special attacks to different classes of troops would have also made battles feel a lot more tactical and therefore less shallow. That being said, battles do feel frightfully tense when you and your opponent's forces are dwindling down to the last few thousand men. Playing with a mouse and keyboard is always the ideal in the game like this, but even in the PS4 version that we played for this review, the controls are fairly straightforward and it's simple enough pause the action, cycle through your units, and send them where they're most needed.

Rock/paper/scissor like duels and debates provide a small dose of variation and are presented in a cinematic style. Duels are bracing turn-based battles fought on horseback and debates require you to use your wit and intellect to argue your point. Duels only occur as randomly triggered events and offer little to the imagination, as they forever take place in the same desolate stretch of desert. Debates prove to be the most entertaining of the two as whittling down your opponent's health by yelling and pointing at them proves to be hilariously absurd. While these sections do implement a change of pace, they can quickly feel tedious as there is a lack of background variation and opponents rarely pose any real type of threat.

The lack of multiplayer feels like a huge missed opportunity as it would have been exhilarating to clash swords with opposing forces online and fight for supreme dominance. Also adding insult to injury is the fact that its four-year-old predecessor came packaged with online play, further begging the question of why it wasn't included as part of the experience this time around.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms XIII may not veer too far from the path of its predecessors, but it's still a worthy addition to the beloved three decade spanning franchise. Battles do admittedly lack a bit of depth and there is a curious absence of online modes, but these gripes fortunately struggle to hamper what is ultimately a decent all round experience capable of satisfying genre newcomers and veterans alike.