Power Up: Here's a game to wrap your brain around

If you're a hard-core, action-oriented gamer, it's probably best to keep turning the pages because in today's column I'll be writing about East India Company, a brand-new PC strategy game with distinctly old-school game design sensibilities.

Created by Finnish developer Nitro Games and published in the United States by SouthPeak Interactive, East India Company offers the kind of entertainment rarely seen anymore in video games. At its heart, East India Company is an exercise in strategic planning with a huge dollop of history thrown in for good measure. While there is the obligatory battle mode, the essence of East India Company is its campaign, which begins in 1600 and runs until 1750. In the campaign, the player controls one of eight European powers of the time, including the likes of England, France, Holland, and the Holy Roman Empire. The goal is to become the dominant economic and naval force of the era by controlling the lucrative sea trade between Europe and India.

Given East India Company's focus on trade, many of the decisions in the game are commodity-based. And if that news doesn't send you reaching for your copy of Gears of War 2, read on. East India Company will challenge you to decide whether you should send your fleet to pick up silk in Calcutta, ivory in West Africa, or diamonds in Cape Town. Whichever you choose, it would be a waste to send those ships to their destinations with empty cargo holds, so you'll also need to decide which locally produced goods will appeal to distant buyers. Thankfully, the game's user interface helps you decide by showing current prices for commodities such as sugar, wool, and guns.

The idea behind the trading, of course, is to accumulate wealth in order to build up port facilities as well as fund more and better ships. East India Company offers nearly a dozen sailing vessels, from light, fast sloops to heavily armed ships-of-the-line.

And while the game's early emphasis is on trade rather than combat, the economic competition between nations quickly spawns naval conflict. In addition to rival nations, players will find themselves beset by pirates. When either of these challenges occurs, East India Company offers options: The player can choose to let the battle be automatically resolved by the computer, or choose to take command of the fray. In portraying sea combat, East India Company uses a gorgeous and realistic 3-D interface reminiscent of the real-time ship-to-ship fighting found in another PC favorite, Empire: Total War.

That's not to say East India Company doesn't have some warts. Load times between certain frequently accessed screens are inexcusably long. Even more annoying is the lack of time compression in the naval combat module. Given that the game portrays combat between sailing ships that need to maneuver for position, sea battles can become quite tedious. Someone should whisper to the design crew at Nitro not to take the phrase real-time strategy quite so literally. The omission of combat time compression is doubly odd, since it is included in the game's trading module.

Despite this rather glaring flaw, East India Company will charm fans of naval games as well as those who enjoy giving their brains, not just their fingers, a workout. The game is available in a boxed version or as a download.

Grade: B

Paradox Interactive. PC. $39.99

Rating: T (13 and older)

On the Web: http://www.eic-game.com

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