East India Company

By Andrew Dagley
July 28, 2009 12:28 PM PST
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Trading games don't come along too often these days, and few games manage to look at such an interesting historical theme as "the Orient -- vast trading networks that developed between Europe. Finnish developers Nitro Games have set their sights on just such things with their new game, East India Company.

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Spices and Silks Ahead!

Trade is an element that is persistent throughout all aspects of human history. It's no surprise then that games focused on trade have become an active niche in the strategy genre, spawning (among other things) the Patrician series. The most recent entry into this sub-genre is East India Company, which focuses on the first two centuries of oceanic trade between the great European nations and Africa, India, and Southeast Asia.

In East India Company every game begins along the model set forward by previous trading games - you've got one ship, a harbor and enough money to begin trading goods to India and back. Your initial steps are guided by company directors and over the course of the game they order you to complete objectives such as importing certain amounts of precious goods, take over Indian ports, or destroy rival companies merchants. Occasional side missions are also available, but on the whole these are largely unimportant and consist on the whole of fetch and carry quests. The majority of your time however, is spent hauling goods to make money. From the money you make off trade you reinvest in new ships, shipyards, and warehouses among other things while competing and eventually fending off the efforts of rival trading companies from other nations.

Barnacles on the Hull

The route from Europe across the ocean to India is not a calm voyage, though. East India Company has more than its share of foibles and faults. The largest of these is the games interface woes, key among them being the separation of cargo management and other important functions from the main strategic map. In essence, every time you need to buy goods, place them on your vessels, or even purchase new ships you'll need to go through a tedious loading screen. Outside of automating trading routes you'll be seeing those screens far too much. Another issue that frequently pops up is the inability to rapidly find out how much each trade good costs in each overseas port and where you'll make the most money selling your goods - while you can easily find out how much goods cost in each port, there is no easy way of correlating that info. Other smaller foibles are also littered throughout the game, such as the ability of late game warships being able to haul nearly as much cargo as dedicated merchant vessels, but these are minor annoyances at worst.