Dear creative assembly/sega

Thank you for your recent release of the latest of the total war games. Empire is indeed a very pretty, very tactical and most enthralling game. It will also be the last game I buy from you C*cksuckers for a VERY long time.

You see the problem is that I never wanted to be a beta tester for you. And I defiantly didn’t want to pay £35 for the privilege. Empire total war has, for now been shelved and I will not be coming back to it for some time, simply because it is virtually unplayable. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve crashed to windows, no error message, no blue screen just “Blip!” And there I am staring at steam.

At first I thought it was my fault, maybe my PC was too slow? It was top the range when I built it three years ago, maybe it’s about time I started checking the system requirements again? Nope, I’m still well over the requirements. Maybe My drivers where not up to date? They where not, but that didn’t solve the problem. Riddled with bugs, moving at a snails pace, unable to move my agents without clicking off a city, unable to select my army properly with ctrl or shift clicking, frame rates that are great one moment, then go to the dogs the next for no reason (and yes I have turned down graphics options, even though the game set most of them high as standard), my forces deciding to end sieges for no reason- resetting the timer to another five turns, ships that will not move in formation, even when grouped and placed, the game crashing every time I hit the year 1750, no matter what I do and an instruction manual that was nothing more than you guys wanking over your latest ‘achievement’. Seriously, the manual was USELESS.

Oh and by the way, when I buy a game on DVD, I expect to be able to play it on DVD. I don’t expect to have to go to steam to authenticate it and play it. I’d just moved house and needed to wait a God damn week before my internet was sorted so I could play.

Its shit like this that encourages piracy. If I had known all the bugs in this game, there is no way I would have paid for it.

In summary, if you release a game like this again, you can kiss my money goodbye, as it stands you won’t be getting your hands on any of it for some time anyway. I suppose I should have expected this, it seems even console developers are happy for the first releases of their games to be so filled with bugs they are almost unplayable. This has to stop, I’ve already decided I’m going to wait at least a month before I buy any new releases. They’ll be cheaper and more stable! I have patience, something you guys seem to lack if you’re releasing something that should probably come with a free cockroach.

Yours with two fingers in the air,

Evis T

P.S

I will write a review for everyone when I can actually play the game through from start to finish.

P.P.S

I’ve had to restart the grand campaign for the THIRD time.