Europa Universalis 4 Is Free On Epic

Monday, a UK watchdog, the ASA, advised that microtransaction ads should know their role and shut their mouth. Also that Star Wars RPG everyone likes is coming to the Switch. Tuesday, Deep Rock Galactic possibly teased the date of its next big update. Wednesday, Activision-Blizzard settled a federal case as quickly as it was filed, and the open beta dates for Battlefield 2042 were revealed. Then on Thursday, DONTNOD started an LGBTQ+ charity campaign with Life is Strange: True Colors, while Toy Soldiers HD got a delay.

Onto this week’s free game on the Epic Games Store, just one this week, and so will next week if all stays the same. Though that is getting ahead of things a little bit. Today we have Europa Universalis IV, a 4X game that doesn’t mind throwing half of European history at you within only a few seconds of playing. The first load screen telling me “You might want to play as the Ottomans, they were the strongest empire in Europe for quite some time.” Really? With the House of Osman (Monarchs of Turkey) stretching from the holy lands to the Algarve (Via Africa) I’d have never guessed such a thing was possible. I hope my sarcasm breaks through even if it is a $20 DLC, for which this is only an on-the-nose jab at the several layers of DLC available for Europa Universalis IV.

Truth is, Europa Universalis IV and I aren’t on the best of terms straight away, as I have had a bad focusing day and it is one of those games that requires you to be there for it. Similarly to Crusader Kings 3, you pick your small land to rule over (mine being Scotland) and you proceed to shout and throw sheep. The experience is largely focused around your ability to zone-in and make delicate moves to shift the balance of power across Eurasia and other lands of the planet as history plays out. Popes and other leaders come and go, you play the puppet master of it all, and proceed to swear when someone else is doing the same through acts of trade, warfare, diplomacy, and colonization.

I feel like Europa Universalis IV and I would have spent many hours together if I wasn’t shouting “squirrel!” every three seconds. As I said last week, I was excited about it, I wanted to give it a proper go and get into one of these 4X games that aren’t set in space. Clearly, that didn’t work out, and while my opinion isn’t filled with detail of how I rode Nessie into battle against Henry VI, I couldn’t provide much more than I that if I tried. I don’t give my opinion here to influence the chances of you picking up the game on the Epic Games Store, I do it because that makes writing about the free games fun. My argument is that you should pick them up even if they aren’t your thing, you might get a taste for something one day.

All this week, you can pick up Europa Universalis IV on the Epic Games Store for free until the morning of the 7th of October. Despite it being the month of Halloween now (not as I write this), we’re not getting another walking simulator with the idea that jump-scares make it horror. No, instead it is only the horror of building PCs (of all things) in a wholly different kind of simulator. Yes, next week I might be more directly talking about the act of trying to get a graphics card ahead for the Crypto bunch for half a billion dollars in PC Building Simulator.