

That being said, battles do feel frightfully tense when you and your opponent's forces are dwindling down to the last few thousand men. 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. During these RTS battles you can destroy enemy bases to lower their morale and create weapons to defend the parameter of your outposts. 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. 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 level of flexibility offered means that you can essentially construct a different game every time you play, allowing for plenty of hours of replayability. 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. 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. 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. Once you've got the basic principles covered you may feel prepared to take on the main mode. 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. Here you'll have the opportunity to play as a diverse cast of characters hailing from the states of Wei, Shu and Wu. 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. 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. Hero mode is a much recommend but completely optional entry point for newcomers to the series. 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. 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.

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.
