It was an interesting gaming situation, sitting down to play a RTS in the Russian Consulate in San Francisco, eating very Slavic food (caviar and pickled asparagus) and trying to keep up with an amazingly complex game. And that was exactly my problem as I started up XIII Century: Blood of Europe, an expansion pack to the original XIII Century that came out last year. Published by 1C Company and developed by Unicorn Games, this is an incredibly in-depth RTS coming out this Summer in a new gold package with everything included on the disk, first game and all. Having a Metacritic score of the pre-expansion at 62 shows that the original was marginally liked by many reviewers, so hopefully, this expansion can improve on the original to make it a more favorable game.

Ok, by now I hope that this is not too obvious, but XIII Century: Blood of Europe is just a game that is almost too daunting to describe in a preview. From my few minutes with it, I saw something that is very specific with how you play. Split up your troops, move the archers here, place your cavalry here, use the hill for this, hide these guys behind those other guys, then wait for the opposing army to rush forward. I'll be real, I was really overwhelmed. It felt like a table-top game of some sort. This is not StarCraft, that's for sure.

So what is interesting about the game? Well, I do have to say that the Russian focused plot seems to be fairly different than the typical RTS story. Saving Western Russia with the skills of Prince Daumantas of Pskov in historically accurate 13th century battles? Sure, why not. And multiplayer modes? Alright. Plus, I've been told that the game aims for high levels of realism, with both combat and graphics, which look to be improved over the original by quite a bit. So check out the pictures and trailer after the jump, and we'll give you a better hands-on when we are able to spend more time with the game before it releases later this summer.