Scenario Review Scenario Title: Europe: 2020 Author: Colon Reviewer: Julia Sasson Fictional scenario. Europe gets split into a bunch of megastates and they have at it in the near future. Temporary Download Link: Download

Overall Rating 13/30 SYNOPSIS: Julia again - you said you needed reviews so here. This scenario was a bit good in some ways but in others I didn't like it. There were too many units. I got really bored playing it but stuck it out to review it. Don't make the same mistake I did. Avoid it, unless you are a fan of those "million-unit march" scenarios. You get to move a lot of units each turn along a lot of railroads. Yippee!

Playability Rating 4 / 10 COMMENTS: I'm just going to quote my other review -- "If you like big modern battles on air, land and sea you will like this scenario. Otherwise... let's just say you will be bored if you don't like to fight, OK? Not all of the civilizations are of equal strength, but that is alright given the premise." I tried it as the Italians and the Eastern Euro's. The Italians all start with everyone loving the president but they can't fight for poop. The so-called peace loving Western Euros immediately invaded me. The Eastern Euros were pretty good but I got in a lot of wars. The key seemed to be to build lots of howitzers and tanks, then use the howitzers to clean out cities in a sneak attack. Then use the tanks and any helicopters and planes to kill all the partisans that showed up (usually like 8 per city, it seemed like, at least in Western Europe). Turns take forever and I don't like waiting. There are some new units and they fit well with the story. For example, there are light helicopters and heavy tanks. Ships go faster now. I thought it was better balanced than a lot of scenarios are. Everybody has lots of defense, though, like city walls and coastal fortresses and so on so it is hard to attack if you aren't really military-oriented. There are no nukes (wah!) so you can't just nuke people and take their cities, either. I admit some of the new units were pretty kewl. I liked the anti-air tank things. They can attack airplanes (shoot down bombers). One big problem is that there are NO EVENTS!! Except a no schism thing that prevents civs from splitting. It's just a big shoot out, man! It really falls down on playability. There are railroads everywhere so getting units to the front is no problem. Usually you can just invade your neighbor on his own rails. The exception was Russia which has less rails and more roads.

Level of General Care 4 / 10 COMMENTS: There are lots of cities and military all over. The cities look like they're in the right places to me, but I dunno, I never was that good at geography. Whoever did the map did a good job. It is a big map of Europe and the Middle East, plus some Africa. The pedia is in place, but there is not much of a readme file. It just tells the story of the formation of the mega-states. I think he should have designed flags for the civs. It would have been a cool idea. I also get sick of looking at the same damn colors all the time. The wonders are all the typical ones, which is weird, so you build Statue of Liberty in Moscow? Come on... make up some wonders! Likewise, there was not much imagination for city buildings. They were basically the defaults, sometimes with slightly different names (parliament for capital, military base for barracks). I would work on this. There were no city names included, either. I think people should always include a city name list. It's not really that hard to do.

Art and Originality 5 / 10 ORIGINALITY: The plot is a bit clever but not very. The mega-states are a nice way to handle the limit on civilization numbers in the game. Still it ends up just being another major slugfest with modern weapons which doesn't do anything for me. It does go a bit into the future so you see fusion tanks and stuff. That was nifty. I wish it went a little farther, though. I ran out of new techs fast. I know that tech trees are supposed to be hard but it really makes a difference to have a good one. ART: The unit art is pretty good. Not great, but good. I think most of it is taken from others' stuff but it works alright. The missing flags and some new terrain would help. Mostly it just needs more units and more of everything else, too.

NOTES: None.

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