Europa Universalis 5 Review: Is It Worth Your Time?

Europa Universalis 5 is a monumental grand strategy experience that demands significant time investment but rewards players with unparalleled historical depth and intricate geopolitical simulation. Guiding a nation from 1337 onwards, this title plunges you into a complex world of diplomacy, warfare, and internal management, creating a gameplay loop that is both overwhelming and deeply compelling. The sheer scope of its systems ensures that every decision carries weight, making it a title for those who relish deep strategic challenges.

This is what many would call a “forever game,” a title you could theoretically play indefinitely. After spending forty-five hours maneuvering, trading, and fighting, I had only progressed through 150 years of Neapolitan history. That leaves roughly 250 more years to uncover secrets, perhaps even the origins of buffalo mozzarella pizza. This timescale represents the core duality of the Europa Universalis experience: a blessing for its depth and a curse for the immense commitment required. Paradox Development Studio’s signature blend of intricate geopolitical mechanics, bewildering complexity, and the irresistible pull of “just one more year” is fully present. You simply need to reserve a few centuries of your own life to appreciate it.

Newcomers to this style of hyper-detailed historical simulation should know that EU5 is about steering a chosen nation through the ages. I selected Naples, a recommended starting nation, but you have the freedom to command powers like the Ottoman Empire, the Shogunate of Japan, or one of many Mayan city-states. Every nation possesses unique mechanics and peculiarities. Losing all territory as Naples means game over, while nomadic powers like the Golden Horde are “army-based,” surviving only until their military is annihilated. Islamic nations prohibit alcohol trade, and Irish tribes enjoy a 10% bonus to livestock production, presumably to ensure there are always cows to raid.

Your primary objective is national survival, though expansion through warfare is a natural path. Combat has its own rhythm, involving the movement of miniature regiments across the map. You watch battles unfold with a sense of detached alarm as your force of 30,000 peasants gets systematically dismantled by Moroccan professional soldiers on a Sicilian mountainside. While raising and directing armies is straightforward, the precise calculations determining victory are buried under layers of statistics, diagrams, and cryptic interface elements. As a veteran of Paradox strategy games, I still don’t fully grasp the exact combat resolution mechanics. My usual strategy involves fielding superior numbers supplemented with the most advanced units available from the technology tree.

Rampant militarism often feels like one of the less engaging ways to experience the simulation, even if it successfully paints the map your preferred shade of national color. Domestic affairs provide a far more inviting playground. I took pride in constructing a network of roads across my kingdom to boost trade and tax efficiency. My capital was transformed into a hub of book printing and textile manufacturing by establishing numerous dye factories and scriptoriums. The social group that appreciated these efforts most was the burghers, urban merchants with a keen eye for profit. However, keeping them happy is only one part of a larger political balancing act.

This introduces the “estates” system, the game’s central political management challenge. Players of Reigns will find the concept familiar. Five influential factions vie for power: the crown (you), the nobility, the clergy, the burghers, and the commoners. A persistent satisfaction meter for each estate sits at the top of the screen. Let any meter dip too low, and rebel factions will begin gathering in the shadows.

Frequent pop-up events force you to choose sides between these competing interests. The clergy might oppose the construction of a new university, while the burghers champion it, whose side do you take? The commoners demand a public holiday, but the nobility insists on harder labor, who wins your favor? These decisions constantly shift the satisfaction meters between red and green as you attempt to maintain a precarious equilibrium.

Occasionally, you grant special privileges to a faction simply to secure temporary peace. I gave the nobility complete control over the navy and allowed the commoners parliamentary representation. However, each privilege granted increases that estate’s political power, and revoking these rights later is intentionally difficult and destabilizing. Doing so could trigger a civil war within the year.

This is merely one of many new systems vying for your attention in this rich historical circus. I haven’t even detailed the trade outposts established in foreign lands, the subtle annexation of Greek territories, or the promotion of literacy to accelerate technological research. The benefit of a simulation with such terrifying scope is its power to generate intense, ahistorical narratives, stories you could explore for a lifetime. The trade-off is confronting an intimidating parade of menus, buttons, and bolded keywords.

It brings to mind waking up at the controls of a submarine: an exciting yet paralyzing array of levers and switches, not always logically arranged. You can meticulously study the in-game encyclopedia and tooltips, or you can dive in and start pressing buttons until something breaks. Both approaches lead to an overwhelming initial experience, even with the text-heavy tutorials attempting to guide you.

The tutorial tries to cover an enormous number of gritty systems rapidly. It introduces the finance screen, road construction, and various map modes, constantly seeming to add “just one more thing” because there is always one more mechanic to learn. This is a giant, intense simulation, more granular than finely ground espresso and significantly more stimulating. Mastering its labyrinthine interface could take days, though veterans of Europa Universalis IV will find much that is familiar.

The game’s specialized vocabulary doesn’t always help clarity. A foreign nation has an “opinion” of you, a separate “trust” level, and a currency called “favors.” These concepts differ subtly but collectively define your diplomatic relationship. Many terms are nearly synonymous. A “rival” is not identical to an “enemy.” One menu is labeled “diplomacy” and another “geopolitics,” though the latter might be more accurately termed “colonialism.” Learning the designers’ intended meanings requires patiently reading tooltips, often while the game is paused as you ponder the difference between “food” and “food raw materials.”

I won’t delve into exhaustive explanations of every menu. It’s more engaging to share the story of when 1.1 million of my citizens perished from the bubonic plague. The disease swept across the nation with immediate and devastating effect. Population numbers plummeted. Monthly events forced me to make difficult choices about which factions to anger and which to merely disappoint.

This plague was one of the first major dramatic shifts for my nation, yet it felt like a machine-generated event. The sense wasn’t that a million individuals had died, but that an invisible hand had fed my population statistics into a grinder to add spice to the simulation. This is acceptable, EUV is fundamentally a complex machine. However, this moment solidified that it wouldn’t replace my affection for Crusader Kings 3, which focuses more on human drama and historical characters rather than dry graphs and charts. Crusader Kings appeals to history buffs fascinated by lineage and personal sagas, while Europa Universalis is built for statisticians who devour military history texts.

New “automation” features help manage the game’s dry complexity. You can delegate entire systems to the computer. Don’t want to manage every trade good? Click a cogwheel to automate it. Tired of handling tax collection? Hand it over to the machine. You can offload the hiring of admirals, construction projects, and technological research, almost every process, to the AI.

But this automation is a double-edged sword. There were moments when the treasury would mysteriously lose fifty proto-euros, with no clear explanation. I wanted to build an Entrepôt, a large commercial dock, costing 320 ducats. Every time my savings approached 300, a chunk of money would vanish, as if the game decided I didn’t need the surplus. The problem only ceased when I manually de-automated trade and production systems.

Automated military commands prove equally unreliable. I repeatedly ordered fleets to hunt enemy navies or armies to besiege castles, only to watch them idle passively as vulnerable enemies passed by or objectives remained untouched. The AI likely has its own internal logic, but it remained inscrutable to me. Eventually, I resorted to manually directing all military movements, proving that human intuition can still outmaneuver artificial intelligence.

These overlapping systems, hidden automated adjustments, and baroque menus create a fascinating monster. When the game becomes understandable, it is immensely satisfying. Yet it often feels like you can’t press one button until you’ve located another, which is buried deep within a maze of sub-menus requiring dedicated study. It’s a wonderfully deep pool of strategic possibilities, albeit one already crowded with confused swimmers from online forums.

For instance, France successfully pressured numerous nations to embargo my trade. For a long time, I couldn’t determine how they achieved this, how to counter it, or what precise impact it had on my economy. An immense amount of activity occurs beneath the surface, much of it not clearly explained within the game itself. The process of learning to solve your nation’s problems is part of the charm, but it demands copious patience and time, resources not everyone possesses in abundance.

You will undoubtedly absorb historical knowledge. However, like a history lesson from a stern schoolmaster, certain political narratives are embedded in the design. Hovering over an African province during the “Age of Discovery,” the tooltip might state: “This province is not owned by any country.” The thousands of indigenous people living there are not considered a “nation” by the game’s definition, and therefore do not “own” the land. This linguistic technicality ensures the colonial mechanics function as intended. This is a deliberate design choice. Europa Universalis 5 focuses on managing a kingdom through centuries often defined by brutal policies. You can establish slave centers, commission conquistadors, deploy missionaries, and enact government policies that cause widespread suffering.

You can certainly choose a non-expansionist path, but building an empire feels central to the simulation. Since empires historically extracted wealth from conquered peripheries for the core’s benefit, this dynamic forms the heart of the gameplay. This isn’t a moral judgment, it reflects historical reality, and developers shouldn’t shy away from simulating these systems. I mention it so players understand that EU5 is unflinchingly blunt about the realities of these centuries. Colonialism happened, the game asserts, and this is how it operated. You are not experiencing a sanitized version of history.

Nor are you experiencing a humanized one. Aside from occasional flavor events about unfamiliar individuals, Europa Universalis 5 abstracts its horrors into a numbers game. Its portrayal of colonialism is wrapped in the dispassionate language of colorful maps and statistics. It is a top-down atlas of a world ripe for division, and in this fundamental aspect, it is designed and expected to be played from a colonizer’s perspective, even if alternatives exist. You must be comfortable role-playing as a crowned opportunist. Historical simulations can provoke thoughtful reflection as easily as they reinforce problematic historical narratives. The Europa Universalis series has some experience navigating this complexity, but it remains a challenging subject within an already challenging game.

Ultimately, this is a deeply engaging, complex, and enduring work. My primary criticism is the need for better instruction. In my opinion, Stellaris and Crusader Kings 3 remain Paradox’s most accessible strategy titles for newcomers. Their tutorials effectively introduce players to the intricate machinery of ruling dynasties and star empires step-by-step. Europa Universalis 5 faces a more complicated educational task. Its simulation is so ambitious that simplification becomes incredibly difficult. The common wisdom is to embrace the initial overwhelm and accept disaster and confusion as part of the fun. Your entire Swedish population might perish because of a button you forgot to press two decades earlier. And that’s perfectly acceptable. Italian monarchs face such dilemmas routinely.

Part of me wished to complete my entire Neapolitan campaign before delivering a final verdict. However, considering it took Naples a full century to discover the Southern Hemisphere, I’ll state it plainly now: this game is bewildering, and I thoroughly enjoy it. Even playing on the second-fastest speed with frequent pausing, I would likely need another forty or fifty hours to reach the end date. This prospect is simultaneously horrifying and thrilling, a game that so flagrantly disrespects my time? Please, disrespect me more, my gloriously messy map monster.

(Source: Rockpaper Shotgun)