Game Details Developer: The Creative assembly

Publisher: Sega

Platform: Windows

Release Date: September 3, 2013

Price: $59.99

Links: Sega e-shop| Steam The Creative assemblySegaWindowsSeptember 3, 2013$59.99

For centuries, historians have argued about the reasons the Roman Empire fell. Was it overextension? Unclear succession? Christianity? Bad luck? Lead poisoning? History, of course, is big, messy, and complicated, so it's probably not any one of those things.

Like Rome itself, the Total War series could have been an empire that lasted for decades. Rome II should have been its crowning achievement. So why is it such a failure? The reasons are big, messy, and complicated, but to sum it up: Rome II takes everything that the Total War series does well and gets it just wrong enough to remove all the tension.

The basic premise is still the same as in previous Total War games. There's a balance between a strategic campaign map with real-time battles. The campaign is turn-based and used primarily to move armies across the utterly gorgeous map, recruit units, construct new buildings, and occasionally engage in diplomacy. Battles, on the other hand, should be tense tactical affairs. Here you maneuver your lines into position and then exploit any advantages you have for victory.

When a Total War game works, all of these components harmonize with one another. Making decisions on the campaign map should be as fun and important as fighting tactical battles. That's how it worked in the first Rome: Total War game from 2004 and the most recent installation, 2011's Shogun II—probably the two high points of the series.

But it's a difficult high-wire act. If any of those components don't work, then the harmony is broken and the game becomes frustrating. And if all of these aspects have issues, the entire game comes to a screeching halt.

Huge map, huger load times

The single biggest problem with Rome II is that it's bloated. The campaign map, as good as it looks, is simply too damn big. There are around 200 different cities, and every one of them is controlled by a faction. Unlike many previous Total War games, there are no independents. Most of those factions are tiny, composed of one or two cities. This makes diplomacy incredibly annoying, as clicking on 30+ factions just to see if they might want a trade route is the opposite of entertaining.

It also becomes tedious to watch the AI opponent take charge of every single one of the dozens of factions while you wait for your turn to come around again. Early on (the game starts in 272 B.C.E., and each turn comprises a year), waiting for the next turn can be a fairly reasonable 20 to 30 seconds. After 10 to 20 years, when all the factions start moving their spies and fighting their wars, waiting for turns bloats up.

The small average faction size forces you to make annoying choices that go against the central point of the game. Exploring the map and setting up trade routes will give you money, but it will also open up more parts of the map. This means the game will be slowed down even further with more tedious AI moves each turn. You can turn off the option to watch AI movement, but that gives you less important information. You can refuse to set up trade routes, but that gives you less money. At one point I found myself taking off my headphones, walking to the sink, and doing a few dishes after every turn. Rome II: great for doing household chores!

A strategic map without strategy...

Excessive wait times might be forgivable if the actions taken during each were compelling, but the campaign map is surprisingly dull in Rome II. The problems spring from an unexpected source—the game's attempt to simplify province management. In Rome II, groups of two to four cities are organized into provinces, which have a powerful capital next to smaller towns. For example, the province of “Provincia” (Provence, in southern France) is composed of the capital of Massilia (Marseille) and the smaller town of Tolosa (Toulouse).

At first blush, this seems like a great idea, getting rid of some micromanagement, fitting with history, and motivating players to complete provinces in one fell swoop. The problem is that the province structure, as implemented, makes delivering information difficult. In Shogun II, public order was simple: each negative point of order could be countered with a unit—four angry faces negated by four units. But because provinces in Rome II include up to four cities, information from them is bigger, more complex, and amorphous. Province information is only given in total, so you just see that you're at, say, -36 public order.

The lack of clear information makes Rome II's choices boring. Each turn is more like “I guess I should build a temple focused more on public order because that might help?” instead of the far more interesting and direct “if I spent my money on this temple now, this province will stop rebelling in three turns.” It's like this for money and food as well, the two other main strategic considerations. Sid Meier's adage that “a game is a series of interesting choices” is a fantastic way to build a strategy game, but there aren't many interesting choices in Rome II.

A tactical mode without tactics

Unfortunately, it's not just the strategic campaign that's messy. The tactical battles are a major step back for the series as well. First, they're distressingly rare. In the first 50 years of a Roman campaign, I had only one pitched battle between relatively even armies. My first major battle simply didn't end, probably because I killed every man in my enemy's last unit instead of routing them—so I had to wait 10 minutes while the timer expired (a later battle crashed while loading the map, highlighting the many technical issues I encountered).

How that battle got to the point of me killing everyone on the enemy's unit, instead of simply routing their army, illustrates the biggest problem with Rome II's tactical combat: it's not particularly tactical. At its best, Total War combat contains several critical decision points. First, you decide how you set up your army: whether to risk missile troops in front of melee troops initially, how to take advantage of hills and forests, and so on. Second, how to engage: whether you want to attack or defend, in part or in whole. And third, once the bulk of the armies are engaged, you pick what will turn the tide. In Shogun II, a well-timed cavalry charge into the flank of an enemy unit can rout them—then the entire army.

Rome II’s battles are more like those in a cut-rate real-time strategy game: messy, anti-tactical scrums where forming lines and maintaining morale aren't considerations compared to throwing all your units into the fray. Battles turn into handfuls of individual units sprinting at one another until a couple are left standing instead of one army breaking another army. All of the components are there, but everything seems off. Charges are too fast, individual units rout too quickly, and those routs don't affect nearby units enough. Shogun II had this balance right, from the release version through the patches and expansions. For perhaps the first time in the series, Rome II appears to have learned nothing from its predecessor.

The fail of Rome

It all adds up to a game that's utterly lacking in urgency or momentum. Yes, the woefully inefficient pace of Rome II after every single turn is the biggest culprit. But there aren't enough fair battles to break up the normal pacing, and those that happen aren't compelling. Developing provinces and economics feels more like tossing a dart at a board than counting down the turns until your shiny new building. The enemy artificial intelligence is practically pacifist, which is extremely odd for a game called “Total War.”

Perhaps what's most dismaying about Total War: Rome II is that it doesn't seem salvageable—its problems are as much conceptual as they are pragmatic. I can't imagine a patch or expansion with a smaller map, even though that would be the biggest possible help the game could get. In most grand strategy games, the motivation to play “just one more turn” is the most appealing part. In Total War: Rome II, “just one more turn” is a threat.

The Good:

It's pretty

The Bad:

Tactical battles are messy and buggy

Strategic mode devoid of interesting decisions

AI is horribly unaggressive

The Ugly:

Clicking the “end turn” button and waiting... and waiting.... and waiting...

Verdict: Skip it. Shogun II is better in every respect, as are several mods for the original Rome: Total War.