If budding megalomaniacs have any doubts over Paradox’s use of the adjective ‘grand’ when describing the genre of its popular strategy series Europa Universalis, let us put them to rest. Europa Universalis was big in every way: the map covered half the known world, it had the same replayability as a Tera Patrick video and great big tadger of a difficulty scale that would leave you whimpering in a foetal position if you were brave enough to take it to the hilt. But Odin knows, this wasn’t mountainous enough for the developer and it went and crammed Europa Universalis III, plus the expansion packs In Nomine and Napoleon’s Ambition into one package, calling it Europa Universalis III: Complete.

‘Dauntless’, would be the description we’d give to the kind of person with no EU III experience who plunges straight into this. You can play from the reign of the virtually unassailable King Henry IV in 1399 right up to the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte, lead one of 250 countries, choose out of around 2,000 provinces and apply an authentic historic mode that declares the fate of over 4,000 monarchs across this period.

This overwhelming detail isn’t the barrier to entry, though – that’ll be the insipid, textheavy tutorial. But while we can criticise its accessibility, arguably because games have whittled our memory and attention span down to a nub the size of a pea, we can’t fault its depth or how easy you fall into it once you’ve conquered the tutorial mountain. It’s niche, but for an hour or two invested in toiling with the interface, you get a huge return.