Rome: Total War Review

But to get back to the real-time battles, even though they were truly a remarkable sight, they weren't without their nagging little drawbacks. The enemy was fairly smart, although for the life of me, I couldn't understand why they wouldn't charge my artillery sometimes. Let me give you an example - I would attack a Nubian city that garrisons twice as many troops as I had in my invading army. Strangely enough even though I would leave my catapults fairly exposed and just keep pounding at their city until half of them were dead, they never once attempted a quick cavalry rush to root out the source of their misery. But you shouldn't consider this a serious AI drawback; I'm not a military strategist, so it could be that Creative Assembly intentionally set things up this way.

It's not 79BC, but who's counting the years anyway.

Awesome equestrian summersault, man! You get 9 for style and 10 for technique.

However, that doesn't in any way alleviate the fact that sometimes my troops would take the strangest routes to their designated location - a bridge or a large building inside a city will confuse the hell out of them and they will exhibit very strange path finding routines. That certainly wasn't the intention of the developers - that much I'm certain of. Finally, while the enemy would react intelligently to my troop movement, my own units would sometimes mindlessly rush the wrong troops even though I incessantly kept ordering them to go elsewhere. I guess they would get all horny in the heat of the battle and decide to pursue whomever they see fit. Then again, when Praetorian Cavalry charges troops with long, pointy spears, it doesn't really fare too well for them ... or for my army.

Another minor gripe I had with Rome: Total War is that sometimes, it's just too easy to lay a siege to the city and sieze it after 5-6 turns. Granted, in the later stages of the game, the citizen will revolt, but that's a minor inconvenience as long as you have well trained troops going up against them. What I consider somewhat ridiculous is that the Carthaginians for example didn't rush to their capital city's aid, and they just let me take it after a couple of turns. Then again, I got cocky like that and attempted the same stunt with the Egyptian capital, Alexandria. Let's just say that I got my ass handed to me down by the Nile.

Would I recommend this game to everyone? Yes, of course. Any self-respecting strategy gamer should own it. However, the underlining impression that I got is that Creative Assembly hasn't expanded on the core game play that much (there is especially room for improvement left in the turn-based department). As far as tactics and empire management are concerned, this is not a (much) more elaborate strategy game, and the AI does have its faults, but this is certainly an infinitely more cinematic and spectacular looking strategy game than before. The rest is all a matter of personal preference.