holoz0r's A-Z of Steam: Commander: Conquest of the Americas

Commander: Conquest of the Americas is a strategy game. It is a game about establishing a colony, and winning land. It is, at its outside, an incredibly complicated game.

First stop: tutorial. The tutorial is voiced by a South African accented man, which is slightly jarring given the fact that this is a game about settling the new lands of what will become an America that only you can envision.

The issue with this, is the pacing of the game. It is slower than Civilization - on a Marathon game setting and that's saying something - for a game that plays out in real time, and gives you the option to increase its simulation speed.

Gaining colonists in order to build new settlements seems to be the first task you really need to master in order to allow your empire to sprawl, however, this is such a slow exercise, that it might just be faster to build a time machine and experience this era of history yourself.

It does not make for a fun game. I can see that the game is heavy with the naval influence - an important battleground in the conquest of any continent, however, the game doesn't reward you with enough cool stuff to start off with, which leads you to wander off through the myriad menu systems that you don't understand.

Complex and complicated systems in games are okay, but when they're unvoiced, unexplained, and just words on a screen that give you promises, not actual outcomes - it becomes really difficult to treat this is a game.

It feels like this is a title that is worse than doing "chores" - and if this is what conquest was like - it is abundandtly clear that conquest is not for me. Do not play. Do not obtain. Avoid.