Rome 2 may be the most difficult game I’ve ever had to review. On paper, it’s everything that I love in a strategy game - massive in scale, full to the brim with tactical options and different factions all vying to secure their place in history. In practice, it’s grandeur is outmaneuvered by a legion of irritations and flaws.
Never have I played a game which is so flawed, yet I have enjoyed so much. Whether it’s the Roman setting or just the sheer scale of Total War: Rome 2, I find myself spending entire days in its intoxicating mix of turn-based and real-time strategy; and yet I can’t help but feel that, in many ways, it’s the worst game in the Total War franchise to date.
Total War: Rome 2 is a grand strategy game in every sense of the word. The game exists on such a massive scale that few are able to equal it; indeed, the only examples of equals that come to mind are earlier Total War titles. You’re given reign of a classical empire and provided with perhaps the grandest of all tasks: rule the known world through whatever means necessary. The scale of this task should make any strategy fan drool, and it’s by far the best aspect of Rome 2. It’s the reason I’ve poured hundreds of hours into playing it - there’s simply so much to do and so many different lands to conquer that no matter how many hundreds of hours I put in, there’s still more to do. Once you learn to deal with the cumbersome user interface and develop the patience needed to endure long waits while enemy factions take their turn - which can often last minutes at a time - there’s plenty of fun to be had. But it’s fun tempered by a large amount of frustration at almost every turn.
Building an empire that spreads from Britain to Egypt fills you with a sense of accomplishment that few other games can match. It’s a truly spectacular feat of gaming and it’s what makes the Total War series one of my favorite gaming franchises of all time. What’s even greater than this, though, is the knowledge that despite conquering more land then I can recall, more than half of the map remains untouched by my armies, and remains occupied by nations that I’ve not even met yet.
Any game which can make the player feel not only satisfied but impressed with only having conquered half of the map is something special. Unfortunately, beyond this sense of immeasurable scale which seeps into every facet of the game, other aspects of the game appear to be either moderate, bad, or downright broken. Past the initial wow-factor of the graphics at maximum settings, there’s none of the polish which made the previous titles so special.
Unfortunately Rome 2 suffers from one of the worst casualties a strategy game can take: it has extremely poor AI, which allows pretty much any player to walk over it without much trouble. Sometimes it feels like the AI is actively trying to let you win. It makes bad decisions and tactical blunders that most player wouldn’t ever consider - both on the campaign map and in battle. It fails to take advantage of openings in your defense, or sometimes throws itself suicidally into battles it has no conceivable chance of winning. Whilst not game breaking, and maybe not even noticeable to some, it makes for a less then challenging gameplay experience that can often leave one feeling dissatisfied.
On the campaign map the AI struggles to group its armies properly, and this can become a major problem. It means that there are dozens of 2 or 3-stack armies moving around that serve absolutely no practical purpose. You can easily take an entire nation with a single army by simply sweeping up units one or two at a time while barely taking any losses at all. But this is only half of the problem. Even on the highest difficulty settings, enemy AI is extremely passive, even cowardly, giving you no other choice than to play as an aggressor. It never seems to take any risks; often, it seems to only attack at all is when its forces outnumber your own at least two to one, or if it sees a city that’s completely undefended. Even if you let the AI get a head start, the ensuing battles beating back the AI still take no effort at all.
Winning battles in the earlier Total War games took appreciation of the battlefield geography, knowledge of units and a strategic mind. You had to plan out your troop movements and react quickly during the heat of battle, making use of every advantage you can find. Beating the AI in Rome 2 takes nowhere near the same level of thought due to the new routing mechanics, where units seem to break from battle with much more ease then in previous titles. Because of how easy it is for an army to route, battles seldom last even 10 minutes. Long gone are the 40 minute epics of Medieval 2 that managed to feel tense, desperate and free-flowing, all at the same time.
Another area in which Rome 2 falls down is that it’s now near impossible to form a proper battle line because of how easily unit formations break apart. In the original Rome: Total War, units held formation and plugged the gaps as they saw them. Rome 2 feels like a mosh pit at a heavy metal concert by comparison. Unit collision has been designed in such a way that once two groups of men begin to push against each other they disintegrate into a disorganized rabble, not at all a representation of what battles were like at the time. Armies triumphed through tactics and discipline, so to see Roman legionaries break apart like common peasants doesn’t do the time period justice at all.
One of the many wonders of previous Total War games was the ability to see a battle of 4,000 men, and being able to zoom in and watch 2 men fight each other to the death in what used to be ground-breaking visuals. Total War: Rome 2 isn’t quite the visual spectacle that the previous titles were upon release, with individual textures and models feeling unpolished and not to the usual high standard, but it still stands out as a technical marvel and an undoubtebly pretty game. To have thousands of men being rendered at the same time on one screen at all is a testament to what can be achieved with modern computers. So although the graphical fidelity isn’t quite what I was expecting based on the magnificent pre-alpha footage, the number of men on screen is still impressive. There have been moments where I actually took my hands of off the keyboard, leaned back in my chair, and just watched my army march forward because of the sheer spectacle of it.
Although the AI doesn’t seem to take full advantage of it, it’s worth mentioning that both the campaign map and battle maps are exceptionally well designed from both a graphical and tactical point of view; and as such are great when played in multiplayer. The absolutely massive campaign map is full of strategic choke points and well-placed cities that serve as brilliant objectives to fight over, allowing for deep tactical thought from the player (whether it’s required or not).
Battle maps are not quite as well designed as the excellent campaign map, but when you’re fighting all over Europe not every battlefield can be good. Unfortunately you’ll rarely see these locations in single-player games, because 90% of battles will take place at cities due to the AI’s unwillingness to attack your armies. Instead they’ll sit back and wait for you to take the fight to them, meaning you’ll often fight a dozen city battles in a row. Creative Assembly has always had issues making city battles compelling and polished of course, but to be fair the technical scale of the task must be huge. There are thousands of units having to move along walls, down streets and up stairs, but although trying to form up your army in city streets is still a difficult task, I’d like to see someone do it better.
While the enemy AI is flaky and the path-finding rather suspect, problems arise elsewhere too. The lack of any auto-attack function is a huge detriment to warfare. It often results in a melee unit standing perfectly still 5 meters from a ranged unit while they get brutally murdered. I’ve lost count of the number of times where I’ve lost an entire unit of men because I was distracted elsewhere and they wouldn’t move forward a few meters without me explicitly telling them to, a huge pain when you’re having to attend to literally thousands of soldiers at once. And when you do issue orders to your units they’re often slow and unresponsive, which thanks to the massive damage missiles cause and how quickly units rout, can totally destroy your plans.
Outside of fighting, diplomacy and senate mechanics feel underdeveloped; diplomacy often seems to rely on how much money you are willing to pay to get someone to agree to what you want, with no nuance or actual skill involved. In a grand strategy game of this scale diplomacy should play a massive part, so the lack of any meaningful form of negotiations hangs heavily on Rome 2. Senate mechanics are even less useful - in fact they don’t seem to serve a purpose at all. In hundreds of hours of play I’ve never seen the senate mechanics actually have any effect on the campaign.
Total War: Rome 2 lacks the overall polish needed for what should be a truly magnificent game. It feels like at least another year was needed to turn Rome 2 into the game that Creative Assembly wanted to make, but instead it was forced out the door before it was a totally complete product. Despite the phenomenal scale of the map, and the incredible amount of time that you can sink into it, Total War: Rome 2 still stands as a disappointment, even so long after a huge number of post-release patches.
The brilliant setting and tantalizing premise would make it worth the purchase if previous Total War games didn’t exist, but as it stands you wouldn’t be missing much if you gave this one a pass. It’s still very much Total War, and there’s still a lot to like and admire about it - particularly in multiplayer; but despite the increase in scale and slightly shinier graphics, Rome 2 doesn’t progress the series enough to make it a truly essential purchase over previous installments.
