However, I thought it would be nice to have a thread where everyone can review games they bought recently, preferably with screenies (which I will include shortly, promise). Today I thought I'd treat myself to Rome : Total War.
Having been a big fan of Shogun : Total War, but left pretty cold by Medieval Total War, I was in 2 minds about this game. Was it going to be another Shogun with new graphics or was it going to be something more?
- Will upload appropriate screenies soon, once I've re-installed SmartFTP -
At first, I thought I was in for another MTW (Medieval), the gameplay is very similar, though that's not too surprising, and even the map screen is very reminiscent of the original, except it's 3D now, which I don't think it used to be.
The graphics are, as always with Total War games, excellent for what they are designed for, which is, quite literally, to have thousands of them on the screen at one time, and I do mean thousands of models, considering the quality of the game when you zoom in among the melee, that's pretty breathtaking. I think RTW has more units on screen than any other of the TW games, and that's pretty good considering the original Shogun used sprites, not 3D models iirc.
The game is played in a very similar fashion to the other Total War games, you have a map area, which you can move your armies around on, and order units/buildings in your captured settlements, and the Combat Screen, which is the actual 'action' part of the game. As with all the Total War games, strategy plays an important part in Total War, not just in the map screen, where over, or under extending yourself can be fatal, but also in Battle. Height and cover are vital, as is knowing your troops abilities.
One nice touch in Rome is the variety of the Armies, the main selling point, which was Elephant cavalry, is not even available to the player in the main campaign, as they are Carthaginian, not Roman. Personally, being a fan of Egyptian stuff, my own personal favourite is wreaking havoc with an Egyptian Army, charioteers and all
Another nice facility in the game is the Combat Multiplayer, which runs pretty well, and is almost as much fun as Warhammer, which this series of games bears more than a passing resemblence to.
The game is pretty flexible in the performance department, you can have smaller unit sizes, lower quality textures etc, though the game runs fine at medium on my 1.7XP with a GeForce5600.
However, the full campaign annoys me, since you are given missions to capture cities half a continent away and the Senate get annoyed if you don't complete them. It means you are so busy trying to protect settlements that you didn't want to capture in the first place, it's extremely hard to get organised.
I enjoyed Rome Total War quite a lot, the battles are a bit easier than the earlier versions, where assaulting a city was a nightmare, but not so easy as to not be a challenge, but the annoying Campaign means I'll probably only use it for Multiplay battles against my brother. Looks-wise it's very nice, after playing Children of the Nile, which starts stammering at about 100 citizens, to play a game which can control many times that without too much trouble.
All in all, if you are into RTS and you like Mutliplay, I can recommend this. If you want a good Campaign-based RTS, go buy Ground Control 2