What an unexpected pleasure!
After playing the demo for about three hours and then trying to save it (and finding out I couldn't) I realised I needed this game. After looking franticly for it, which I couldn't find it at EBgames, so I had to drive an extra few miles to get to Best Buy. In the end though it was worth pestering a few clerks to finnaly get them to go into the back and find the game.
What makes this game so great is the fact that you can play any of the nations you see, from any place in the world. If you want to be the pope jump on and have some popeish fun. If you want to play as the Republic of Regusa your welcome to, heck you can even play Japan. With so many options of play its no wonder the offical score is 8.7 and that most players who have played it agree with that score.
What makes this game so great is the fact that you get the great ammount of depth that other titles don't give you but its still easy and playable by the masses. You can change your government edit your religon (some times).
The only dark side is the mutiplayer, my brother and I bought it in the hopes of playing a large scale LAN based game, but it constantly crashes during multiplay. Unfortunatly to this date its still only on patch 1.1 (which was the same patch that was up back in January), so untill they patch the multiplayer we've had to curb our massive battles.
What would make this game even better would be to add commandable battles (though you'd have to add turns) and create a more detailed map, other than that Europa is a winner for any stratagy fan.