Summary

Rome: Total War?...Total War: Rome?...Rome Remastered: War in Totality? is a strategy game originally released in 2004. It was developed by Creative Assembly and published by Activision (now Sega. Corporatism...) We will be playing the remaster that came out in 2021. In it, you play as...Rome. There is...war?

I am so very afraid. Strategy is far from my bread and butter. But I'm covering best games of all time and Total War stuff is frequently mentioned there. In addition, a general goal I've had is covering at least one game in every genre. So it's time.

Review

Oof. Didn't realize going in how long that was gonna be. Really wasn't looking for another Fallout 4 behemoth taking up months and months of my time. But there it was. Never let it be said that I am not a giving Emperor. I didn't have a terrible time. I do have things to say about the experience, so strap in.

So as was said a number of times in the series, I did not know what I was doing. This was totally new ground. Had never Total War'd. Hadn't even really strategy game'd. One of the big takeaways that I think needs to be screamed from the rooftops is this game was terrible at tutorializing. Like, miserably embarrassingly bad. Maybe other games are similarly bad and it's just my familiarity with the other basic genres that allows me to skip past some of the "obvious" bits and get straight into things that differ between a given game and the rest in the genre. I have no idea! Not really a thing that can be known as we all only have our own experiences and those can't be turned off to get a fresh perspective. However, I can speak authoritatively on what it is like coming to Rome: Total War for the first time. Bad!

The game starts you down the path of the Julii and for a bit, you're led through some of the basic controls. This is good. I had on all tutorial controls that I could find, with the intention of allowing the game to create the gentlest on-ramp that it could. But something terribly odd happens like 30-40 minutes in. The tutorializing just stops. Victoria is stricken dumb and her words are no longer golden and welcome. She switches from like an active mode to a passive one. Where she now only pipes up when you hover over a city. There's not even some popup window announcing this or anything. This is no good. There are so so many really important concepts that the game does not bring up at all in the first active tutorial bit. And it does not deign to ever consider your experience after this point. I don't know why. It's inexplicable. She drops you so suddenly from the nest and expects you to fly.

If you really do not give a shit about a first-time player's experience then I mean, go with God. But I am telling you, the devs did not make this an approachable game. There was a lot of assumed knowledge. And see, if you're a strategy person and your response to my comments is "You don't know what you're saying. This is an easy and approachable game." All I can tell you is that does not speak well of the rest of the genre. I strongly suspect the only reason I didn't have a miserable time is I had the difficulty cranked so low that it didn't end up mattering. Had I played on like normal or god forbid, any of the higher difficulties, we'd be having a very different conversation right now. As it is, I got through the game by virtue of it being easy enough that I was able to fail up. But that's not really a great crucible for ensuring future success. I know with certainty that the game took a lot longer to complete than it realistically should have. There's so many little things. An effective strategy for taking cities. How many armies you should have going to accomplish a particular objective. What the makeup of those armies should be. A general missive that you should be aggressive. There's no real diplomacy lesson ever given. I still feel like I don't really understand how to wield that system effectively. There was once or twice where something nice happened, but many other times where everything I could see is that I had someone cornered and I offered them an ultimatum and instead they just went down with the ship. So like, what's the point?

Moving past the tutorializing, because I think I could go on for a while questioning why things weren't explained, I had an okay time playing a strategy game. I may at some point do a Medieval. That seemed to be the one several people pointed to. Will not be for some time. These games are a bit long for my liking. It does at least inspire a certain amount of satisfaction looking at the blood-red map. Knowing the hours of effort that have gone into making it that way. But I mostly just have different values. I know that I could get more enjoyment out of playing like 3-4 indie or AA games with strong central premises that get where they're going in the same time it took to do a total war. Sometimes I'm in the mood for a big historical epic. So I could see myself doing it again. But it'll be a bit.

Links

Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXbBIoFOxaQuJYYSc-cldJZMtK8Xxyi40