Total War: EMPIRE – Definitive Edition
Worth it · Strategy · 2009
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $19.99.
- Length
- 52.6h
- Value
- $0.38/hr
- Reviews
- 91% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 1 GB of memory, 15 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Command the seas, control the land, forge a new nation, and conquer the globe.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $3.74, set in January 2013. It has been discounted 80 times in the 14 years tracked here, typically at 75 percent off, with about 8 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 5 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 8 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 1 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 92 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 96 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Total War: SHOGUN 2 ($8.99, scores 86) beats it on value, while it beats Total War: MEDIEVAL II – Definitive Edition ($19.99, scores 62).
This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 11 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written November 2023 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 61 percent of the 811 reviews written there were positive, against 91 percent overall, and those are 4 percent of everything written about it.
The main story runs 52.6 hours. Doing everything runs 245, 4.7 times as long.
Still 2.0K concurrent players, 17 years in.
The drop-off
75% start to <1% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
2,028 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Peak Total War game, if they were smart they would completely remaster this game and add some minor nations/nation-states and give us Total War Empire II maybe even starting it off where this one ends - 1800ish
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Total War: EMPIRE – Definitive Edition scores 84/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/10500/total-war-empire-definitive-editionThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 13, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.