Victoria Game Reviews

Victoria Game Reviews

Victoria Overall Rating: 8
Victoria Manual: 4

Some initial notes on Victoria.

The Victoria owners manual is the poorest yet of the three games I've purchased (including HOI and EUII). It assumes (I assume) that anyone who buys Victoria must also have the other two to pick up some of the fundamental game concepts.

And yet, the good news is that the game is really quite good if one can stick with it to get past the manual. Much of the game concepts are the same or similar to Hearts of Iron and Europa Universalis. Victoria builds on them and adds more detail and complexity on to the basic game engine. But I didn't stick with it at first. Out of frustration, after a weekend or two wasted trying to figure it out, I put it away for several months.

There is no tutorial built into the game.

The manual (a licensee manual rather than an owner's manual) omits many key fine points such as:

Who was Victoria?*
What was Verdun?*

Neither one of these is probably all that confusing to the average historian, but I'm not sure that most people would pick up on the relevance of both of these and other terms.

Several things are also confusing/misleading:

For instance, one of the dialog box reads: "Enter your name: Patric". Who writes "Patric" in English?**

A few other annoying things:

Autosave takes too long. Even at 3 months, the time to save is too long compared the the elapsed time. Still, given the crashes I have had with the other two games, I don't want to take a chance.

Contrast is very poor with much of the navigation/button area as well as on the terrain map especially with NATO icons.

Text size is way too small. I'm using a 17" monitor, and it's almost impossible to see unless I get much closer than my usual three feet away from the monitor - which is fine with every other game or piece of software I've ever used to date.

Budget: It's really annoying that one has to leave the Budget panel to effect changes. There should be an OK or similar button.