The Civil War

The Good
I must say that the programmer, Steven Morle-Green, really tried to improve it. He asked for suggestions and implemented many of them in a series of patches. It had an encyclopedia which was ok, but it didn't have very detailed information (the average entry was about 5 sentences long!). It also came with a little illustrated book that told how life was for soldiers during the Civil War. This was one of the most interesting parts of the whole package.

Another nice thing was the game featured multiplayer support via LAN or modem. Since I didn't know anyone else with the game, I never tried it in multiplayer until several years after I got it (over LAN), and it crashed during the first battle...

The Bad
The "icons" -- from the main screen to the unit identification icons -- are so badly done it's almost impossible to tell what they're representing in some cases. The sprites that represent the units during battles are horrendous... the regiments move like stick figures. Also, the game would have to re-render the graphics everytime zooming in or out during battles. With the computers back in 95, this took several seconds and made for bad gameplay...

The music -- traditional Civil War songs -- is pretty dismal. It's like bad MIDI stuff. There are no volume controls... only on or off.

The game also had a lot of bugs. During battles, sometimes units would suddenly fly across the screen for no reason. In the strategic mode, if units moved by water sometimes they would get "stuck" in the water! Argh! It was hard to tell if some units weren't moving because of the difficulty setting (you could make it so that units wouldn't always act on orders immediately because of delays in the order reaching them) or if it was just a bug. I tend to think that in many cases they were bugs, because I don't think it should've taken a unit the whole course of the war before it would finally begin to act on the order. :)

I must admit that the programmer did improve the sprites and icons, and also fixed a lot of bugs, as patches came out. The references above are to the original version.

The Bottom Line
The game could have been really good. It was a quasi-real time strategy game... You would spend the "night hours" planning moves and ordering cities to raise and train regiments, build railroads, etc. In the day hours, the units would move and real-time battles would occur. However, with the poor graphics, bad music, and bugs, it just wasn't a very good game.

A valiant attempt, but it just falls short in too many areas.