"Strength and Honor come to Total War"

I've followed the Total War series from day one... I played Shogun like there was no tomorrow, but was always frustrated at how easy it seemed to have your liege die with no heirs. Still, the game was fun, and the battle system was something relatively fresh, that I got a whole lot out of. When Medieval came out, I jumped on it right away, and was happy to see that the scope of the game had been expanded, and that there were a lot more unit types to choose from, since Shogun had been fairly limited. I played Medieval extensively, and when I finally got word of Rome, I waited amazingly impatiently for it... I finally bought it the first day it was at the EB at my store, and I even bought a new PC to play it on. And I can say that it was easily worth the expense.

Rome is such an overhaul from the previous games that it's just mindblowing. Every aspect of the game has been fine-tuned in some way or another -- enough to put it years ahead of Medieval, and make it even more of an improvement over the first two games than I ever could've expected.

I'm going to overlook the storyline and controls section, just because they aren't really all that important to the game. I'm going to focus on gameplay, graphics, and sound.

GRAPHICS

This is perhaps the best-improved feature of Rome. While in Medieval, units were fairly bland, Rome adds an incredible level of detail to the soldiers, environments, and buildings. I initially played it on a laptop with only 384 ram and a 32MB video card, and it still looked impressive. When I got my new PC with a 256 Radeon 9550, it looked flat-out stunning. The level of detail in the soldiers are staggering, right down to the individual ripples and layers of their armor. The environments are extremely well designed and animated, and really give a feeling of immersion in the battle. The cities are also very detailed, with all the buildings constructed in the turn-based mode appearing in battles during the Imperial Campaign. The keyword here is DETAIL, and there is a ton of it.

SOUND

Sound was never really that important to me in games -- I always thought of it as a nice extra, but not something that was essential to a gaming experience. Rome has sort of changed my mind on that matter, just because of the overall quality of the sound effects. When your soldiers march, you hear the thundering of their footsteps as they march. When they fight, you can hear the clanging of metal on metal, and people's death cries and shouts as they charge. Everything that happens in a battle has a very lifelike sound to it, and it works in tandem with the nearly flawless graphics to create a very immersive war experience -- I've already forgotten there were people in my dorm room while fighting a heated battle!

GAMEPLAY

The gameplay itself, as far as interacting and playing, isn't all that different, for all the improvements that have been made. The one major change (and very good change) deals with the method of movement on the turn-based map. Instead of merely moving armies from province to province, armies now navigate along the campaign map itself, moving across rivers, through mountain passes, and such. In theory, you can use these to your advantage, but in all honesty, I have yet to set up an effective ambush, or really use the topography to my advantage. It's an excellent feature to implement, but it doesn't always come in handy.

OVERALL

To summarize, this game kicks complete ass. I haven't been this engrossed in a wargame in a long time, and I'm happy to be so. The real-time battles are so radically changed that you'll have plenty to entertain yourself with (I never get sick of zooming in to ground level and watching my beautifully detailed soldiers duke it out with the enemy), and the turn-based mode has some extra flavor to it. Plus, the radical shifts in the game (first the reforms of Gaius Marius, then the eruption of civil war and the exile of the Roman families) provide VERY dramatic shifts in gameplay, first changing your style of combat, and then completely flipping the world on its ass, turning trusted allies into bitter enemies, and forcing your war onto yet another front. These changes help to keep the pace of the game moving, where Medieval could get stagnant for long periods of time.

In a nutshell, if you're a dedicated wargamer, you owe it to yourself to own this game before any other wargame out on the market right now. It's that. Damn. Good.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 09/27/04