The prospects for strategy games on iPad are truly bright. Whether Romance of the Three Kingdoms strikes your fancy is immaterial to the bigger point, which is that this platform feels like it was designed to play this type of game. Screens may grow larger or smaller, and interfaces will obviously become more sophisticated, but what's here already makes playing a game like Romance of the Three Kingdoms instantly more intuitive. The game defaults to a landscape view, making use of real estate at the sides of the screen, or across the horizontal axis. The first thing you'll notice is how crisp the graphics are on the iPad screen. Cut-scenes are largely done through static art, framed and presented with captions, so nothing is really taxing the graphic engine too greatly. This is mostly a board game, but a very colorful one.

The music is also an upfront item that will make you smile. It evokes a sense of sweeping historical epic, whether it actually parallels the periods depicted in the game. We would have liked more dialogue and ambition shown in depicting troop movements or battles, but the board game presentation is perfectly fine for what it attempts to show. Most of the time, you'll have a perspective of the entire country, viewing territories as they are ceded to one force or another, according to color. You can tap specific areas to view more detail on almost every part of the game, accompanied by pictures of the leaders in a specific region, but the only other notable view is during battle. During battles you initiate, you'll drill down to the actual geography being contested. Unlike the Risk feel sustained during the regional deployments, battles are more like a standard, turn-based strategy game. You'll have a chance to move or split your forces, and to attack enemy units once per turn. All the good features of any turn-based game are here, including visual cues for terrain that will allow you to box enemies in, or that will slow your own troops.

If you're not familiar with the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, you only have about two thousand years of history to catch up on... Seriously, this is a fixture of Chinese cultural history, but Koei has done a nice job packaging it all in an easy-to-play format. Well... easy it may not be, but we'll get to that later. The most important thing to know is that Romance of the Three Kingdoms draws heavily from early games developed by Koei for platforms like the NES (we did say "early games"), Sega systems, and the PC. This version isn't really a port as much as the latest in a series of games with a lineage almost as impressive as that of any Chinese dynasty. If you're reading this from a Western perspective, try to imagine the cultural importance of stories like Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and you can get an inkling of why audiences in the East never get tired of playing through scenarios based on Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Combine the strong source material with the popularity of battlefield strategy simulations, and you have yet another selling-point. A big takeaway from spending time with Romance of the Three Kingdoms for iPad is that it is simulating more than just battles. This is really a bigger historical simulation that requires skill in managing territory, populations and politics.

The downside to all this depth and breadth is that it requires a great deal of effort from the player. This is far from a casual strategy title, and it doesn't dial down difficulty or scope. There is a lot of reading material contained in the game, right down to a glossary of terms introduced during play. The basic turn in the game involves making decisions for a city and region you control, which may include engaging in battle. Before even beginning a battle, you'll have to choose whether you want historical accuracy, where characters actually age and die! There are four scenarios playable in this version of the game, corresponding to four major chapters of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms story. Each historical scenario presents a slightly different board layout, from the small skirmishes of "190 AD - The Fall of Dong Zhou" to the epic tripart struggle of "217 AD - The Three Kingdoms." The other two episodes, "195 AD - Heroes of Legend" and "208 AD - Zhuge Liang Rises" are more like "Dong Zhou" in that they still show China largely open and caught between many competing interests. Four more fictional scenarios are available, beginning in 198 AD and running through 230 AD. Chinese history buffs will not be disappointed or find themselves low on inspiration!

So there's this tutorial... Mostly, when you complete a tutorial, you feel qualified to at least play through the early stages of a game, right? Not exactly in this case. The helper portion of Romance of the Three Kingdoms includes a truly hilarious back-and-forth between Liu Bei and his brother, Guan Yu, where Liu Bei is overconfident and deaf to Guan Yu's wise teachings. At least the advice given is good, so you can learn as you watch samples from various phases of gameplay, including battles. The tutorial is a nice, thorough tour of the various features in the game, and conveys some sense of how to play Romance of the Three Kingdoms, plus the Glossary and a Hints section. Both will be frequent reading, as the hints aren't exactly spoilers. The biggest issue with Romance of the Three Kingdoms is that it remains very open-ended; this is the opposite of linear gameplay. Skilled players, or those with previous experience in these games for other systems, will be at home immediately. The rest of us will struggle to figure out why one set of options is better than another. Losing is a good indication that you're doing it wrong, but there can be a lot of waiting for the moment when you realize that your Chinese goose is cooked. Where most turn-based strategy games are like checkers, this is like chess. Skilled chess players know the difference between committing a certain pawn to a certain spot on the board, where the rest of us are just fixated on moving them aside so we can deploy the "big guns." Decisions you make early on in Romance of the Three Kingdoms seem of little consequence, but may be a series of missteps leading you to certain defeat. The idea of guiding a player through might seem out of place considering the legacy of these games, but there's a definite need for this feature, if Romance of the Three Kingdoms is going to reach beyond a truly hardcore group of strategy/simulation gamers. Even for these players, there's a learning curve required to come up to speed on the different options for controlling your generals, cities, and territories if you hope to claim victory as the last man standing.

The Custom Officers Mode available from the main menu really belongs in this section, because it lets you roll a series of characters, modifying everything from their picture to their full name, and vital stats. You can even specify their year of birth, to improve the accuracy of the simulation. Playing with these custom officers is only possibly in the fictional campaigns, of course, but it opens up great new possibilities for gameplay. Don't think of this as a gameplay editor, but more as a way to build a force for battle that embodies characteristics you specify. The idea of a battlefield or scenario editor is great, but doesn't factor in here. We also missed the opportunity to share battle results or created officers with other players. Nothing is more obviously missing from this incarnation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms than some social element. The other idiosyncrasies of the game are its tendency to complain about short memory when you open it after using other applications. The "fix" for this condition is to turn off the iPad and wait two minutes, which seems a bit ridiculous, but the warning you read about game crashes is no joke. We experienced such crashes a few times, and thought about how devastating they would be for players who hadn't saved recently. Auto-save is built in, so it's not like you'll lose everything you've done, but the annoyance factor is high to say the least.

We love the idea of Romance of the Three Kingdoms for iPad, and their execution of a touch-screen strategy game is generally on the money. It's a tough game that rewards patient players willing to dig deep into the various levers used for building cities, developing armies, and conquering territory. If you're not the type who likes to read instructions, expect to spend lots of time fumbling around. Koei didn't build Romance of the Three Kingdoms to be easy, but to be a reflection of its source material. The battles are a highlight of this game, and we wish there were more of them that were more accessible. Having too many options or choices is almost the same as having no choice at all, which forces game developers to walk that tightrope between open and linear structure. Koei went big and ended up with something that 80% of the people out there will find hard to penetrate. Stick it out, read the manual, and you'll be in for a nice ride. After all, thousands of years of Chinese history can't be wrong...