Europa Universalis 5 Review – IGN

As I loaded up Paradox's latest and most ambitious grand strategy game, Europa Universalis 5, I was reminded of a news report I once saw about a man who grew up in a tribal village seeing an airplane for the first time. This can't be true, right? Couldn't this giant piece of metal fly through the sky at hundreds of miles an hour? It seems incredible to attempt to conquer a 500-year period from 1337 AD to 1837 AD while modeling every human being in the world at a completely unprecedented level of detail. But it does it all. For a genre veteran like myself, this is generally very engaging and enjoyable. As for whether it can soar? That's all. There's a lot of turbulence out there and I'm not going to risk my life to make sure I get there without crashing.

Let me start by saying that this review is based primarily on the version I received on October 16th, and to a lesser extent on a moderately sized patch released on the 22nd that fixed a lot of the bugs that bothered me. There's a bigger patch coming out on the 29th, but I'll just have to try it out before I lock this review in. There's even a big patch scheduled before release. Overall, I think these patches have been improving the balance situation, which I'll discuss in a moment, but I can't say whether they will remove all the annoyances when you get your hands on them. I can only talk about what I've played.

From a systems perspective, EU5 is undoubtedly a marvel. Paradox continues to push the limits of how much fine-grained detail it can simulate, and I might even accuse this ridiculously huge historical epic of going too far. It's definitely bulky and I'm particularly concerned that this will make it difficult to balance. Solve one small thing and the ripples it creates through a variety of economic, geographical, demographic and political chain reactions can create more than 300 chain reactions. It does seem a bit arrogant of me to be so dramatic, and I've seen some evidence of the problems it can cause.
But damn. Damn it! It's incredible to have an entire world depicted in such a level of detail in a video game. for each of its predecessor provinces, Global Europe 4there are approximately seven separate locations in Europa Universalis 5. While each space on the map in Europa Universalis 4 can only have a single, monolithic religion and culture, Europa Universalis 5's population mechanic represents the culture, religion, and social class of every living human being. Population must be taken into account to create a rich relationship with each location in our country and balance many things in a naturalistic way without the need for an abstract currency like “management points”. In EU4, terrain type is a single modifier. In EU5, terrain, climate, and vegetation are all independent factors that can affect everything from agricultural output to combat.

Just scroll through the map and marvel at the amount of work that goes into it, this is a surefire recipe for history nerds. It also looks very smooth. I don't think this is necessarily the prettiest map in Paradox. You'll see some strange artifacts around the rugged terrain and complex coastline that are a bit ugly. for my money, Crusader Kings 3 and Victoria 3 Looks a little better. But it's certainly the most detailed. Especially with the ability to move troops between different cultures, social classes, skill levels, and even degrees of professionalism in uniforms—a formation can hold up to 30 people, depending on the number of troops—it's never boring to zoom in.

This does mean that EU5 is only available to certified GSP players, as well as aspiring GSP players. It’s not for lack of tutorials available. Right here, it actually does a pretty good job of giving you at least a start on walking. Automation lets you hand off certain things to AI until you're ready to micromanage them. Nested tooltips are also very useful, at least until you find one of the many edge cases they don't have. But I have played EU4 for over 2000 hours. This is my most played game on Steam. Even so, it took me about an hour to feel comfortable unpausing EU5, and dozens of hours before I felt I knew what I was doing.

And for me, that's not a bad thing! I think the trial-and-error learning period is part of the fun of a grand strategy game like this, and part of building a relationship with it. But it takes a lot of patience, and I don't think Paradox will expand its audience with this game. EU5 knows exactly who it's for, and it caters specifically to those people – people like me – very unapologetically.

Getting into the groove of running a country can be incredibly engrossing. Planning the location of a new market town, how to connect it to my road network, and how to utilize local resources in my workshop to make huge trading profits that are better than drugs. Control and Proximity are excellent new mechanics that model how you can't necessarily manage something just because you paint it your color. Coupled with a redesigned estate system, you can complete an almost infinite number of projects and face countless challenges without ever leaving the borders. The geographical granularity here adds a lot to country management and warfare, which are well developed with new terrain modifiers and logistics systems.

That is, when everything works fine.

Major bugs are uncommon and usually not game-breaking. Most of EU5's current problems are with what I call tuning. The numbers, balance, and AI aren't quite tuned yet to provide a satisfying or historic experience. I saw some weird stuff like Bohemia, a port on the Baltic coast that colonized half of Canada. The Holy Roman Empire completely failed to consolidate. There is no clear winner for Türkiye. Borders are everywhere. China… is terrible. The strangest thing is that Europeans colonized most of Australia but for some reason never even discovered India. It's hard to say how much of this is typical, but I don't have thousands of hours to play a statistically significant number of campaigns.

It's an all-around vibe. Countries will behave very strangely compared to what you expect. After about 1500, the borders became too static, even as the Protestant Reformation tried to mix things up. States did not form often in history. There are a lot of interesting scenes and flavor events, but they don't result in a realistic-looking globe. Furthermore, despite our efforts to slow down colonization, by 1700 I still see all of South America populated by formal states, with the entire Congo Basin speaking Italian. They either invented Duolingo very early or cured malaria. Not sure which one. This stuff really bothers me. I don't need history to play out exactly like it does in our world, but some of it is just silly. I hope it looks somewhat reasonable by the end. Historic.

I also encountered inconsistent crashes during one of my two full playthroughs. In my first game as a powerful Norwegian colony in Greenland, I only had four crashes in the entire 500 years. In my second campaign as a Portugal player, I sometimes get more than that in ten years. After asking Paradox about the issue, I found some workarounds so it's playable, but very annoying. (Pro tip: If this happens to you frequently, turn off the buildings tab in the outline. Works wonders.) Paradox has supported its grand strategy games for years after launch, with one recent exception (the tragic Emperor: Rome), so I'm really pretty confident that this stuff will be ironed out. But I wouldn't blame anyone for waiting six months for more polish before committing. The sheer complexity of the EU5 simulation did raise some concerns in me about whether it would be possible to make it perform well.

Thankfully, what I don't really have to worry about is performance. For such a CPU-intensive game, I'm concerned about this. But I tried it on three different processors: a Ryzen 7 3700X, a Ryzen 7 5800XT, and a Core i7 13620H laptop. I spend most of my gaming time on the 3700X since that's my primary desktop, and despite being below Paradox's recommended specs, I don't think the slowdown is a big issue. It's noticeably slower than the i7, but I still find it to be very fast to play with, and I've only seen noticeable sluggishness during large-scale wars in the past 100 years or so.

On the 3700X, the run started in less than a second, and by the 1800s it was only about two seconds at worst, with a little extra delay at the beginning of each month because there was more to calculate. It took me about 60 hours to play through the entire game at top speed, which included intentionally slowing down for most of the war. It never stalls or turns into a slideshow late in the game like Victoria 3 or Hearts of Iron 4 sometimes did, and the interface remains sharply responsive even when the simulation stutters a bit, which made a huge difference to my psyche. Overall, I find the optimization almost astounding for the amount of stuff that's going on.