You can create an officer, your first main character, from scratch, choose him from a list of historical figures, or take a quick personality quiz to have one assigned to you. You'll start off small, of course, with very little money and reputation, and the focus in the short term is to advance your skills, your stature and your forces. You're focusing on areas like fame, strength, loyalty and social standing. You'll be calling the shots for more and more land mass as times goes on.

There are two central views – the outside, isometric view of the world map and the city map. The map view is used mostly to travel between cities. Inside each city, depending on size, are many areas. There are government buildings, civilian buildings (like the always-key tavern) and more to do than you'll be able to wrap your head around at the beginning.

The initial tutorials are extremely heavy in particular game vocabulary. For each area you visit, you'll have options for what to do, who to talk to, and how to react. You'll be doing all of this for the purposes of getting new tasks and building your character. There must be dozens of different options from every turn, so at first it's best to just focus on accomplishing a request (the game's term for mission). If you haven't played earlier versions of the game, the sheer amount of information will probably be overwhelming.

Some requests are absurdly simple, such go here and talk to a certain person. Some are much more involved and include combat. As you gain money and men, you'll have more and more options for spending your time and the more you play the more some of the relatively obtuse menu and command names become second nature.

Over time, as you become more famous and important in the game world, you'll have more and more people willing to talk to you. As complicated as RotTK is at the outset, it's exponentially more complicated in the middle. You'll have so many things going on at once – cities that need managing, requests running together – that it's very challenging to pull it all off. Toward the end, some tasks are easier to ignore and your path to glory is a little more obvious.

Whether you choose life as a free officer, vassal, prefect, viceroy or sovereign will determine how much you want to get involved in the bigger picture. You can be intimately aware of political goings-on or simply roam the countryside recruiting men and conquering cities. There are a lot of options and your choices make for very different game experiences. If you decide to take a more historical approach, there will be lots of dueling, debates and city management to go along with your combat. But if you focus only on taking land, you'll be in combat most of the time and the game can move much more quickly. Either way, the game ends when all cities are unified under someone – it could be you, but it doesn't have to be. Your chosen level of involvement in the story changes your experience a great deal – the duties of a wandering warlord are a lot different from those of a king.

Combat is an integral part of the game – mostly mass battlefield work. You can fight one on one to settle some loose ends, but the meat of the fighting is meant for large groups. Ordering troops around in the bunches – foot, horse and archers – is simple and easy to master. They can all be upgraded, of course, and over time you'll hardly recognize your men.

In a siege, you win by destroying the city gate, all the enemy troops or the opposing commanding officer. If you destroy the gate first, the battle moves inside the city against the remaining troops. This part of the game plays like a turn-based version of Total War, but with less views of the action up close and personal. There are many sieges to fend off and instigate, and plenty of open-field battles to be won. The variety is nice, too, with terrain and structure changes keeping things fresh.

The drawbacks are mixed. First, the presentation is hard on the eyes. Most views are pixilated and do nothing more than get across basic information. The character head shots look like they were done for a previous generation of hardware, and battle scenes are a mass of small, blurry figures that scuffle around a spotty landscape of barely distinguishable features. The score is appropriate for epic battles, but there is no voiceover work. Even for a strategy game, it's stuck in the past in these ways.

To be fair, there isn't that much to be done with a game consisting of so many text menus. The interface takes you into an incredible amount of layers and there are options for every aspect of rule. The result is a game of micromanagement at times. The larger your forces, the more time you'll spend in menus getting things done.

And the AI, the more you play, becomes easier to trounce. Some circumstances make for a difficult battle no matter what – it's part of the game. But in a lot of cases, you'll find yourself taking advantage of obvious bad moves by the computer. The enemy doesn't take advantage of the three key troops' strengths and weaknesses as often as it could (horse trump foot, foot trump archers and archers trump horse), which is disappointing considering it's a fundamental game concept. In all, however, the game remains mostly challenging at every level – at least as challenging as other strategy combat games. It's just not as involved or efficient as the micromanagement aspects.

There is so much detail to Romance of the Three Kingdoms X that it has to be seen to be understood. It's a very deep, involved gaming experience that can absorb hours before you know it. And the new edition brings with it new challenges and new scenarios based on solid gameplay. But it's hampered by a dated presentation and relatively predictable opposition from the computer. If you've played this series to completion before, you may be tired of the formula. If not, it's a good example of just how complex a console strategy game can be without giving up anything to its PC cousins.