I’ve been playing Total War series games since Rome Total War first came out back in 2004 and I fell in love, as did many others. It was a revolutionary game by being the first attempt to make such a strategy game on such a massive scale. Over the years the Total War series has expanded and entered many different eras from the Medieval era to the Napoleonic era. Every good franchise though needs to return to its roots so Creative Assembly came out with Rome 2 Total War; I was stoked and wanted to play this game till my fingers fell off, sadly the love affair is short lived.
What I like :
- It’s Rome! I fell in love with the time period before and I still adore it to this day.
- The interface has been given some practical changes since Shogun 2. I can now load up Rome 2 and instantly just launch right back into my campaign
- The campaign map looks beautiful to say the least
What I dislike:
- It’s…unfinished (What a shock). The game is full of glitches, bugs, and crashes to the point that any internet forum is overcome with reports of them.
- I hope you have a supercomputer to run this game or at least $800-$1,200 to spend on building one; the game may not be as demanding as say Battlefield 4 but it still requires a serious build. Here are the specs.
- The AI is still way too passive and dumber than dirt. The AI is extremely passive to any military advancements you’ll make and when they do decide to respond it’s usually with just a ton of poorly equipped armies thrown at you with no organization at all. On the battlefield it’s just as bad, I hate having to chase down fleeing range units and it’s just too easy to defend against waves of soldiers being thrown at you with no tactical planning.
- You can’t win. I have put 30 hours into the game so far and have two campaigns running (Rome and Macedon) and have reached the point where it’s just impossible to continue. The game is a balance between military conquest and keeping your populace fed and happy, sadly once you expand to a certain point the people will just become unhappy. This in turn will halt any expansion and force you to garrison huge armies into provinces to keep everyone happy and under control. Failure to keep the people happy will cause a revolt and unlike Total War’s of old where a revolt is a small pathetic army, a revolt in Rome 2 is a closer to a full scale invasion force.
- The graphics don’t resemble those of a finished $60 game that requires the computing power of god to run. Honestly, Medieval Total War 2, a now seven year old game, would look better than this running on max settings
I really really wanted to love this game and finally get a finished product from Creative Assembly but they just failed to deliver. I’m stuck with a buggy and unfinished product again and am currently waiting for them or the modding community to fix this game. If you really want this game wait till Christmas time when it drops in price but, if you can’t wait I’d suggest going to the www.twcenter.net and finding a mod to overhaul this game.
