Rome: Total War is the third installation in the RTS Total War series and is arguably the best. Like the first two Total Wars –Shogun and Medieval- the campaign uses Turn Based Strategy on the campaign map and Real Time Strategy on the battle map. The RTS side of the game is obviously where Creative Assembly has concentrated their improvements. A significant change from Medieval to Rome is on the Heads Up Display of the battle map. During the course of a fight your forces will often spread across large areas of the map, in previous games (especially Shogun when you couldn’t tell your troops from the enemies) you had to pick through the battle looking for a dozen men who, quite often have become a dozen dead men by the time you do find them. In Rome, all your units are listed on a bar on your screen as unit “cards”, simply double click a unit card and you will be taken to the that group of soldiers. The graphics have also been greatly improved and you can now zoom in on the action to take full advantage of the graphics that were for the time of the games release, beautiful and unique.

Creative Assembly haven’t forgotten the campaign map however and changes here are also exceptionally good. The “chess board” style of the map has been abandoned, when you move one of your armies, the leader of the army will march to the desired location and if an attack is needed will lunge with his sword at the enemy before the game gives you a choice of auto-resolve, fighting manually or withdrawing. If you get bored of sending your generals all over Europe and Asia stabbing other commanders then you can simply double click the left mouse button to fast forward your generals move time which comes in handy if you’re moving lots of armies to far off locations.

To start with you can play only as one of three ruling family factions in Rome, the Julii, the Brutii or the Scipii families all of whom are allied to each other and the SPQR (Latin for the Senate and People of Rome) a non-playable faction that controls Rome and gives varying missions to all three Roman factions. To a first player of the Total War series the vastness of the campaign map can be daunting and because of the nice folks down at Creative have given you the option of a short campaign as well as the long one. The short campaign changes from different factions but usually involves taking over roughly 15 settlements to win the game whereas the long campaign orders you to take control of Rome, conquer 50 settlements and destroy one of your rivals.

When Rome: Total War was first released in 2004 it surpassed the exceptionally high standards many people had set it and left RTS fans hungry for Medieval II which was released in 2006. Rome: Total War set an example for future RTS games and created a large and loyal fan base for the Total War saga.

9/10

Labels: PC, Retro review, Rome, Total War

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