Empire: Total War: The Expensive Edition

Where would a new, big-name game be these days without an expensive collector’s edition? It wouldn’t be a new, big-name game, that’s where it would be. Feels like these things aren’t a bonus any more…they’re now a right of passage. And so we come to Empire: Total War’s attempt to come packaged in a bigger box with a higher price tag. Called the “Special Forces Edition”, there’s no gold-plated musket, no George Washington action figure, no game case in the shape of a surgeon’s hacksaw. There’s just a map. A big map. Oh, and a range of elite units that you don’t get in the regular edition. Were I Sega’s expensive edition teacher, this would be marked C-, with “this is not 2004, must try harder” scrawled at the top of the box.