Europa Universalis V

It’s not without its faults, though, with crashes, stuttering and weird bugs that will, hopefully get squashed soon, but the total sum of its parts cannot be denied: Europa Universalis V is Paradox at the height of its powers, and I cannot wait to see where things land as the game matures over time.

Issues aside, Europa Universalis 5 has been an utterly incredible introduction to a whole new gaming world for me. It’s wonderfully welcoming yet entrancingly absorbing, and I can’t recommend it enough to anyone interested in getting into the grand strategy genre.

Even with so many hours in the review build, I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface, and I have yet to see a single campaign to the end; it is a Paradox game after all. That, more than anything, is the grandest praise I can attribute to the game. It is absorbing, seemingly infinitely replayable, deeper than the Mariana Trench, and sets a new standard for what grand strategy should mean.

Europa Universalis V marks the start of a bright new age for Paradox's Grand Strategy series, rebuilding the core, while retaining so much of the breadth, detail and regionality. There's some slight rough edges, which aren't surprising for a game of this scale, and room for expansion to better explore certain ideas and regions, but isn't there always?

A new bar for complexity in the historical grand strategy genre that sometimes buckles under the weight of its ambition.

Despite small nitpicks such as recycled events and an at-times rough user interface, Europa Universalis 5 is a fantastic grand strategy game. Extremely complex but well worth the effort it takes to learn, this game feels like developer Paradox has learned the lessons of the last 15 years of its games.