History Channel Civil War: A Nation Divided

List Price: $19.99 Discount Price: $2.95

Features:

• Control full compliments of troops and move them across the battlefield - cavalry, musketeers, riflemen and more
• Command cannons and mortars, build and take forts and experience 3D combat
• Full reference section with a Civil War timeline, historical documents, and hundreds of real photographs

Accessories:
PC Gamer (1-year)	Games for Windows: The Official Magazine

Customer Reviews:

If you like kids shoot'em up games this is for you [Posted on 2007-08-21]
This is an arcade type real time first person kind of game. How much real history is there depends on your viewpoint on shoot'em up games. I did not care for it at all and was a waste of my time. If you want real history look for the HPS games.

Plays like a bad "Call of Duty" [Posted on 2007-11-15]
I bought this game primarily for the weapons. I'm a huge Western nerd, and there aren't too many first-person shooters out there that realistically model weapons of the Western era (or, in this case, mostly pre-cursors of those weapons). I had watched a few gameplay videos online, and despite the poor reviews, it looked good enough to get on the cheap and shoot around.


The Good - The weapons. They are well-modeled, and pretty accurate in appearance. Reloading has obviously been greatly sped up (and even then, it still seems interminable to reload one of the black-powder revolvers), but it still goes through most of the realistic motions. The guns are cycled, new cartridges inserted, cylinders replaced, powder poured, etc. I admire the accuracy the development team attempted. Also, the guns are all based off of actual guns used during the period. Now, no one soldier ever used all of these guns at once (most just had their standard issue rifles, and I believe only officers were issued the then-new revolvers), and it's hard to see a practical difference in most of the rifles besides reloading time, but it was still very fun to have so many different options. The Sharps rifle, the early Winchester lever-action, a cap-and-ball musket, the Colt revolving rifle, all cool. Also nice is the large puff of smoke that each gun gives off (accurate), and the gun-shots sound very satisfying.

The graphics are not bad, for the most part.

Creating a Civil War FPS is unique and a nice break from WWII and modern action games.


The Bad - Everything else. What voice-acting there is is terrible, the scripted events are yawn-inducing, the damage modeling is just as annoying as the Medal of Honor and Call of Duty games (where an enemy takes three shots and only cringes for a second, then keeps firing), the constant enemy spawning sucks, your teammates are useless, the enemy AI is dumb, the missions are all boring and repetitive, the level design is boring and obviously linear (invisible barriers everywhere!), and the game utterly fails at recreating a compelling Civil War experience.

**

So, while it was worth it to me to pick up cheap just to shoot these guns, I wouldn't recommend the game to anyone else. I admire the development team for taking a chance and doing something other than another WWII or modern FPS, but they could have done a lot better. Here's hoping someone tries again!

Civil War A Nation Divided [Posted on 2008-02-22]
My daughter bought this program for me for Christmas because I am a Civil War enthusiast. What a piece of junk!!! I realized it would not run on Vista so I attempted to run it in XP compatible ... no luck. I tried three different video cards ... still no luck. I then brought out my work laptop with XP and it fits all of the requirements. It will go past the first minute and then the frame rate is so bad it is not worth playing. If I had known that it was a worthless game I would have returned it but since I have used Activision before I felt I would eventually get it to operate correctly ... wrong.

Don't waste your money!

Darn good rootin' tootin' shootin' [Posted on 2008-06-26]
For some, this game may not do the trick, but I found myself immersed in the Civil War. The graphics aren't cutting edge, and the gameplay is so-so, but, if you like history, and always wanted to know what it felt like to tramp through Civil War America as a grunt, this is your chance. I loved shooting the old guns. They take a long time to load, but then so do your opponents as you watch them struggle with their ramrod to get off a shot at you.

The only problem I had is that there were not enough levels. I played through the whole game in less than 8 hours (not all at once).

The path you take is very linear, and you don't have many choices, but what soldier does? Just "follow me."

If you have to have the latest greatest thrills, don't bother, but if you like history and want to be a civil war ground-pounder for a while, go for it.

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