Cliff Notes – Europa Universalis 5 review – everybody wants to run the world
- Complexity and Depth: Europa Universalis 5 offers an unparalleled level of detail and complexity, simulating a vast historical period where players can control any nation from 1337 to 1836, allowing for intricate decision-making and strategic planning.
- Sandbox Experience: Unlike many strategy games, it provides a true sandbox environment with no set objectives, enabling players to explore alternative historical scenarios without the pressure of achieving specific goals.
- Accessibility Challenges: While the game excels in depth, it presents significant barriers to entry for newcomers due to its intricate mechanics and interface, requiring extensive experimentation and experience to master.
The most complicated video game ever
Europa Universalis 5 – as complicated as it looks.
One of the most complicated video games ever made attempts to simulate literally everything about a 500 year period of history, in which you get to shape the world however you want.
The PC is currently enjoying a new golden age as a popular video game format, but there are clear differences between now and its last period of pre-eminence in the 90s. Back then there was barely any such thing as indie gaming and console exclusive titles never appeared on PC, while the PC itself received many big budget exclusives, published by major publishers.
Times have changed, and largely for the better, but the one downside is that those exclusives have disappeared. There are plenty of smaller budget indie titles that remain PC only but the only other ones tend to be complex strategy games that only really work with a fast processor and a keyboard and mouse.
Unless they get it working on Switch 2, Sega’s Total War will probably never appear on consoles, but other so-called grand strategy games have, such as Paradox’s Stellaris and Crusader Kings. So far though, Europa Universalis has never made that trip and while you should never say never, this new sequel illustrates why being unashamedly complicated is sometimes no bad thing.
Most of Paradox’s grand strategies work in similar ways but with a different geographical and temporal scale. Europa Universalis lets you take control of any country that existed from between 1337 and 1836 (in other words, it begins at the point at which the modern sense of nationhood first emerged). Despite what the name implies, the whole world is simulated and you can take control of whoever you want – even if many modern nations don’t exist when the game first starts.
Imagine a combination of Risk and Civilization and you’re someway to imagining how the game works but the layers of detail and complex decisions are far in excess of any more mainstream title. What also separates it from Civilization, especially the more rigid recent new entry, is that it’s a true sandbox game with no set goals.
You don’t have to conquer the world at all, you can just mess around making up historical what ifs all day if you prefer, and the game will neither stop you nor tell you have (or haven’t) achieved anything.
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Warfare is never a focus, unless you make it so, and you can dominate the world through economic and political means, just as much as invasion. The series has always attempted to be as realistic as possible, even though it quickly diverges from real history as soon as you start to make your decisions.
Real world events, such as the Black Death and French Revolution, are thrown no matter how much your version of history diverges from reality, although when taken to extremes that can seem very odd and breaks the otherwise solid sense of realism.
The world map might look similar to the ones in Total War et al. but the level of detail here is dizzying. Countries are not just monolithic entities but a collection of individual locations with their own cultural, geographical, and agricultural peculiarities. Paradox boasts that each individual person in the world is simulated on some level, and it really feels like it (not least in the amount of time the AI takes to make a turn at the end of a complete playthrough – something that can easily last up to 60 hours).
Although looking after your own country is often the most boring part of Civilization and Total War here it’s arguably the star of the show, with the amount of detail you can drill down into, in terms of stats and data, proving highly engrossing. Centralising your governmental and military control, while building up infrastructure and codifying laws is fascinating stuff, that feels just as much like an interactive history lesson as it does a game.
There are moving graphics if you zoom in
Like the under appreciated Frostpunk 2 it also makes clear how difficult it is to be a truly benevolent leader. If you want a strong and united country then trying to please everyone, all the time rarely leads to the outcome you want, as you struggle to avoid taking the more totalitarian option each time. The best grand strategy games make you think about more than just politics and trade, and that comes across very clearly in Europa Universalis 5.
The complexity of the game creates two obvious problems, neither of which the developers have been able to circumvent. The first is that it is, as you can see from the screenshots, horribly confusing and takes literally days of experimentation and study to understand how anything in the game works. This isn’t a flaw – you either have this problem or you have a considerably shallower game – but it makes it a very difficult thing for newcomers to get their heads around.
It’s not even that the tutorials or tooltips are bad, they’re better and more helpful than you’d expect, but experience is the only real teacher here. Although, interestingly, you can put the computer in control of almost every aspect of the game, to run it on autopilot, should some elements not interest you (we were so glad not to have to bother about trade). Plus, if you go all the way that means the game can essentially play itself, which is a strangely fascinating experience.
The other issue is that it’s clearly been very hard for the developers to balance everything, given how many countries and moving parts there are – especially when they’re trying to keep things realistic and in line with historical fact. The latter frequently doesn’t work though and creates very unlikely looking maps, that seem nonsensical purely from a point of practicality, let alone historical accuracy.
It’s unclear whether this is because you’ve just veered too far from reality or if it’s essentially a bug. There are a lot of glitches and some terrible slowdown at time, while the AI never seems quite up to playing the game at a high level – almost as if it’s a newbie learning the ropes too. It’s very insular and defensive and doesn’t take advantage of your mistakes most of the time, much like Civilisation.
There’s been a flurry of patches during the review period and we’ll sure there’ll be more to come, so this isn’t a failure Paradox has failed to account for but a sign of how crazy of an idea this was to even attempt in the first place.
And yet here we are with entry number five in the series, not counting spin-offs and sister series. Even with the bugs this entry is undoubtedly the best yet and while it will never win any awards for accessibility the developer clearly recognises this and instead leans into making Europa Universalis 5 the most detailed, the most complex, and the most versatile grand strategy game ever made.
Europa Universalis 5 review summary
In Short: It’s the very opposite of pick up and play but the level of detail and complexity in Europa Universalis 5 is truly staggering and matched only by the difficultly of learning how to play it.
Pros: An astounding achievement in game design, with a mind-boggling level of detail and complete freedom to do whatever you want in a realistically simulated historical world. A spirited attempt at making the tutorials at least somewhat helpful.
Cons: Almost laughably impenetrable in terms of both interface and gameplay. A lot of bugs and balancing problems, although there’s been a lot of pre-launch patches already.
Score: 8/10
Formats: PC
Price: £49.99
Publisher: Paradox Interactive
Developer: Paradox Tinto
Release Date: 4th November 2025
Age Rating: 12
