Total War Rome II Review - A Pyrrhic victory

Nine years and four titles after, I once again dive into the role of a Roman tactician and commander. From September 3, the Total War series has returned with a much hyped new entry: Rome II, the official sequel to Rome: Total War, the game that bewitched gamers in 2004 thanks to its fully three-dimensional graphics engine  and a very rewarding Empire management section.

Since its announcement, Rome II has been praised for its impressive graphics engine, capable of bringing a great level of detail in the series. The game engine is the same one that moved our Samurai warriors in Shogun 2 , although of course it has been heavily modified to keep pace with the latest technology. The armies of the thirteen factions freely are recreated with a wealth of details that will make happy even the most demanding users, who expect a maniacal graphic reconstruction. Between height differences, different features, different pieces of equipment, pace and animations, it will be really hard, if not impossible, to catch two soldiers completely identical to each other. If all this isn’t enough for you, it’s always possible to zoom into the very heart of the dramatic melee fights to witness the faces of anger, grief and despair expressed by soldiers.

 

The effort put by Creative Assembly into the realization of the battlefield, the armies, their behaviors, animations and special effects such as lighting, explosions etc. is simply remarkable. Even the strategic map has been significantly improved in all respects, although I personally preferred the choice used in Shogun 2, with a paper map to show where the territories were unexplored or unknown. Now the world is enveloped by a scary fog of war, which on one hand provides a healthy fear of the unknown and on the other hand teases to lift the veil and look beyond our borders. In short, it’s very difficult for any other product in the genre to match the visual beauty and the peaks of excellence touched by Rome II, at least in my experience with strategy games.

For all those who are entering now the Total War series and have no idea what it is, I’ll clarify that Rome 2 (as Shogun 2 before it and all the other installments of the series) is a game that actually combines two genres: management and strategy. The management part occupies a good chunk of the time devoted to the game, while the strategic side is activated when an army under our control comes into conflict with an opposing army. The game scene moves then from the strategic map to the battlefield, enabling us to be a true commander. The goal of the game is to manage our empire in the best possible way from economy issues to territory conquest, and obviously ultimately to impose our hegemony over the known world. Simple, right?

In this regard it should be noted that the game world features 173 territories divided into 53 provinces, from the Alps to the Pyramids, from Manzanares to the Rhine and far beyond: in present terms, from Afghanistan to the current Portugal.

 

 

The management phase is very reminiscent of what you can do - in the simplest terms, of course - during a game of Risk. Our territories provide us with the profits that remain in the coffers of the Res Publica after levied taxes and income and after paying various fees. With this budget, we must act wisely and find the right balance between political investments (such as infrastructure improvements and expansion of production) and military investments, namely the maintenance and/or creation of fleets and armies necessary to ensure the territorial defense and further expansion.

The management of territories and provinces is not that convincing at first, since the related interface appears to be radically changed compared to the past and I’m not ashamed to say that I have lost about a couple of hours to get familiar with the new layout of buttons and options. I have to admit that the visual offer of Shogun 2 felt way more intuitive.
The strategic phase leaves the turn based management, proposing real-time battles instead.

 

Thousands of soldiers divided into units of hundreds of components are first deployed on the battlefield and then guided to carry out simple orders (movement and attack). Some units, such as shooting or those that flank the general, can be directed to perform a more specific task: throwing flaming arrows, incite another unit, execute a special command (the legionaries, for example, can stand in testudo to better withstand the arrows fired by the enemy). In this phase there are relatively few changes, and I expect that each veteran of the series will feel at home in a short time.

It is no coincidence that I wrote “all veterans of the series”, because it seems that Total War: Rome 2 has been specifically designed to make this group of people particularly happy, especially those who have enjoyed Rome: Total War above the other entries. The learning curve for the uninitiated is very steep, since the game actually suggests very little. After a few rounds those who have never played a Total War game in their life are, for all intents and purposes, left to themselves, surrounded and besieged by the Samnites from each cardinal point, quickly taking the road of imperial defeat. This surprised me to say the least, because it relegates Rome 2 on an exclusive basis for true strategy fans, leaving newcomers - perhaps attracted by the graphics, the historical accuracy  and electrifying gameplay - pretty much in a rough spot.

 

 

It’s not enough to improve graphics and implement combined sieges between ground units and naval fleets to make this a truly great game, with both the ever-loyal as well as those who would like to get into Total War. It’s as if, after spending years and years in driving school with a Fiat 500, all of a sudden you get to board a Ferrari. A phenomenal experience, at least until the first corner when you’ll inevitably slam into a wall because you have not been trained well.

 

Those who, like me, had the good fortune, honor or great desire to get their hands on the game the very day of its debut, also received a very bitter surprise. Bitter as the one received by Caesar Augustus in the 9th year of the Lord, when he learned that the three most feared legions of the Roman army, the seventeenth, eighteenth and the nineteenth had been swept away by the traitor Arminio, deep into Teutoburg Forest, Germany.
The game has already received three heavy-handed patches from the development team. This was, and still is necessary as Rome II shipped with substantial flaws at the programming level. The biggest flaw was undoubtedly the poor optimization: PC configurations worth a thousand Euros or more, able to smoothly run the likes of Battlefield 3, Crysis 3 and The Witcher 2 at max settings, are easily brought to their knees. Moreover, we also had to deal with washed out textures, indecent frame rate drops and many other minor problems.

 

Beyond the visuals, I have to report the long waits between turns and often unexplainable behavior of artificial intelligence during both strategic and tactical phases: some units under our command sometimes simply cannot find the right way forward, which is a long standing franchise issue that Creative Assembly promised to fix before the release. This, combined with the aforementioned difficulty curve (certainly not for everyone to endure) makes Rome 2 a niche title. This may not be the worst thing in the world in itself, but factoring the heavy technical shortcomings (which are being solved, but I’m afraid it will take a few more weeks at least) as well, I cannot reward this effort of Creative Assembly with flying colors or recommend it as blindly as I did for Medieval 2 and Shogun 2.

 

To cite two other illustrious Romans, I’ll conclude by saying that Creative Assembly has sinned in a hurry as Marcus Minucius Rufus did. Perhaps if they followed in the footsteps of Quintus Fabius Maximus, delaying the release of the game for a few months, the success of Rome II would have been far more conclusive and convincing.