Ironclads: American Civil War Demo

The American Civil War decided the fate of an entire continent, albeit at the cost of many human lives. Plenty of historical battles took place during those years, some of which have their own entry in the history books and they are considered to be critical to how the entire conflict turned out in the end, even if the actual skirmish lasted just for a day or two.

Ironclads: American Civil War is a turn-based strategy that allows you to participate in some of the lesser known battles from that era, namely the ones fought out on the sea. Although technology didn’t allow for too much firepower, other than the crude cannons they were equipped with, the projectiles could still make holes in the enemy ships and sink them.

As the developers argue, the two dozen missions available inside the game are all created after real events, using verified data from original documents and the like. Moreover, even the ships are modeled after the real ones used in the war, although the low graphic quality makes this feature rather difficult to appreciate. It’s good to know that historical accuracy is part of the deal, however.

The gameplay is about as turn-based as it can possibly be, which means that you get a certain number of action points (a number you cannot see) to use every turn, although they only count for movement. Hence, the shooting does not subtract any of the available action points, but you can only do so once from every cannon, and you must face the enemy ship from the right angle.

There are many problems with this system, one of which is the fact that you are forced to move continuously, which is made even worse by the annoying ‘physics’ system. There are plenty of bugs and annoyances that delay the action, or even makes it impossible to continue playing from time to time, without using the reload function.

All things considered, Ironclads: American Civil War makes it very difficult for anyone to like it, because it tries so hard to annoy you. Regardless of how much of a Civil War fanatic you might consider yourself to be, the game is not worth the trouble, at least not in this crude state.