I never thought I`d find the game that would get the better of me, until I started playing Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI. Quite frankly, I think the game is one of the most complicated games of this year. While I`m sure loyal fans will be pleased by all the attention to detail, we "casual gamers" will be left scratching our heads.

I`m going to write this from a "newcomer to the series" perspective, which is in fact true, and because fans of the series don`t need to read a review to buy the game or enjoy it to its fullest. As I was mentioning to someone before, there is a difference between complicated and complex. From my point of view, and probably others as well, RotTK is unnecessarily complicated and almost makes you want to stop playing from the first tutorial mission.

If you`re used to other strategy games, then elements of RotTK may seem familiar, but that`s about it. You can easily tell this from the (lengthy) tutorial. Don`t think that the tutorial is there to help you, by the way, it`s there to show you how little you know and how many things you should know in order to play RotTK properly. The tutorial consists of several missions linked together, each one being unlocked when the previous one is completed, that take several good hours to complete all together. Its main problem is the fact that nothing is explained in detail, and you are left trying to discover things on your own, which wouldn`t be a bad thing, but RotTK has one of the most complicated interfaces I have ever seen.

Also, your head is filled with dozens of Chinese names that mean absolutely nothing to me (but they should to readers of the excellent (so I hear) novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms), but serve as a good distraction from the actually helpful part of the tutorial text.

The game is split into three parts. The main part of the game will be spent in the kingdom overview window, that allows you to manage your cities, your officers, train your troops, build different buildings, fight battles and... just about everything else. You will spend most of your time in this view that actually reminded me of Civilization 2 in a lot of ways, including how the units look like. Building city improvements is an important part of the game, one that is treated a little differently in RotTK. There are a limited number of spaces where buildings can be placed, a number which seems to be randomly determined. Thus you are forced to specialize by building only farms and granaries in one city, mines and mints in others and build your troop production buildings in key cities only.

Troop recruitment is handled by a unit basis. You mush recruit troops each turn to make an army, then build weapons for them and assign them to a troop, while also giving them food, gold, and several officers to lead them in battle. Officers have different efficiency when leading different types of troops, but you can easily see which officer is best suited to a special troop type. Most of them also offer special bonuses or abilities to units, such as Rain of Fire for archers that will surely change the tide of battle.