The real war is between the content and the interface

People have been armchair-quarterbacking the Civil War forever. This turn-based strategy game American Civil War lets you settle all that by controlling the Union or Confederacy in campaigns that focus on individual years or the entire five-year war.

Much like in the Civ series, you have a set number of turns to build your armies, shore up supply lines, and win the war while dealing with terrain, troop morale, and civilian support. You choose where your forces will go and what they’ll attack, and the game decides each turn’s outcome. You can set offensive or defensive modes for each unit, and choose attack styles -- whether your troops will lay siege to a town, occupy it, or burn it.

Prepare for lots (and lots) of clicking.

Despite decent graphics and sound, the clunky interface makes this feel like drummed-up shareware. It’s easy enough to select a unit and direct it, but there’s no quick way to jump from active unit to active unit around the massive map. You’ll spend too much time clicking on visible units and on your towns to see if new regiments have been formed. And the “tutorial” is just dozens of screens of text.

Our biggest criticism is its performance. It’s normal for a turn-based strategy game to need a few moments to tally up the changes after each turn, but this game almost crashed every time, sticking us with 40 to 60 seconds of Mac OS 10.6.7’s rainbow pinwheel and an unresponsive application before it finally resolved itself and processed the turn.

The bottom line. This game has more than enough content for Civil War buffs to get into, but the overall implementation feels clunky to the point that even die-hard players will lose interest.