With all the World War II hubbub going on in the shooter department (and spilling over into RTSs), it’s nice to get a change of pace. I can understand the fascination with WWII — it’s a war that spanned the world on multiple fronts, with a sometimes chilling delineation between good and madness that’s still vivid today, thanks in part to big-budget films like Saving Private Ryan and lesser-known projects like Conspiracy. However, the Civil War holds its own quite well because the cultural and regional divisions that separated us then still separate us now, for the most part. With the political demographic having changed relatively little since the Civil War, the roots of the differences between the North and the South are still deep in our country’s soil.
And as turns out, the Civil War is just part of the package in American Conquest: Divided Nation, which is under development by GSC Game World for the first time (the guys who are also doing STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl). Along with that, AC:DV covers the Texas War of Independence occurring about thirty years earlier, and the Battle of New Orleans in 1812. You’ll get to take the role of Gen. Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson or Ulysses S. Grant and fight across over 50 battles spread through the three conflicts. In the Texas War, you can also battle at San Jacinto and fight to defend the Alamo (as I’m sure many of us have wondered about from time to time). You can play on both sides of the Civil War, and both sides of the Texas War, and you can even play a pirate faction. This last group is pretty neat because you get to start a community (and hopefully an empire) from scratch, plunder cities, and do the usual pirate deeds. Just watch out for the ironclad warships, of any nation…
