Napoleon: Total War

In my very first battle I noticed a pillar of smoke emerging from a building in a nearby town. Imagine my dismay when I slid the camera over to find the AI had positioned one of its cannons maybe 10 yards behind a town house and was launching cannonball after cannonball into it in a mad attempt to get to me. It was like watching a zombie pawing at a pane of glass.

A more creepy side to the AI revealed itself as I engaged it on any map where it had access to some form of cover, a fence or low stone wall. It didn't matter where the AI and I drew battle lines, it would always take one regiment and have them squatting by that piece of cover, way out in the middle of nowhere. What were those soldiers doing?

For all these quirks, the AI will still hold its own and provides you with a challenge that suits the difficulty you select. But from a more demanding perspective, it's all very well the game telling you to arrange your army with the skirmishers in front and to overlap fields of fire and the like, but it's not something you ever see the AI doing.

The strategic AI on the world map isn't half as eccentric, but it might still disappoint. You'll see sizeable enemy armies lounging around your near-undefended cities, find lone, pathetic regiments sat dug-in by themselves, and conquer capital cities after overwhelming bizarrely weak defence forces. Again, you will get a challenge in accordance to the difficulty you select, but not once will you feel you're matching wits with an enemy general. It's as if, in trying to provide an accurate simulation of being Napoleon, Creative Assembly replaced all the other world leaders with potato clocks.

Napoleon does boast a feature which counteracts this, in a sense. The multiplayer options here are more robust than any Total War game to date. As well as the usual online battles, there's now the option to enable Drop-In Battles when you're playing a single-player campaign. This means that in every battle you fight, the game will put some online feelers out and see if it can pull in a real human to replace the AI for you. Likewise, you'll occasionally get an offer to leave your campaign to quickly take control of a huge English navy, Italian rebels, an Ottoman strike force or anything else in between.

Also, at last, at long last, Napoleon: Total War boasts campaign multiplayer out of the box (albeit limited to a maximum of two players). I couldn't try it because the European servers aren't getting turned on until the day of the game's release, but I'm convinced that playing one of the smaller campaign maps of Italy or Egypt with a friend could be as much fun as two strategy nerds can have with their tweed jackets on. However, I'm also worried that Creative Assembly is using the same frail netcode that you can currently experience in beta form in Empire: Total War.

Multiplayer mysteries aside, Napoleon represents a healthy step forward for the Total War series. The visual improvements, more pleasant interface, neater structure and smooth learning curve easily justify the low asking price of £20. That the AI still leaves a lot to be desired and the naval battles are still boring is a shame, and the former is something Creative Assembly sorely need to remedy for the series' next reboot.