Rome: Total War : Games : Web Wombat

It's just not a proper war without togas, speeches and damn silly tactical maneuvers based entirely around racial memories of outbreaks of the bubonic plague.

Providing all three at once and with a full cast of incendiary pigs, elephants, soldiers, cavalry and senators, Creative Assembly's Rome: Total War has everything a growing boy needs.

A big step up from it's predecessors, Rome takes everything good about the series and rejigs it to the umpteenth level, complementing the proceedings with a fresh and oh-so-pretty battle engine that really brings your involvement in the game to a totally new plane.

As with the previous two Total War games, Rome is divided into two separate but equally important gamely segments.

There are the battles, in which you, as the omnipotent ruler of Stuff, mass your forces and send them into battle for the glory of Rome, and then there's the turn-based campaign, which you toy with when not preoccupied with kicking seven shades of fettuccini out of your enemies.

Basically, every turn (representing six months of the year) you get to move your armies about the real-time 3D map of Europe, spend money on your settlements, and double-deal from the shadows. Basically, you're looking at a cross between the best elements of Civilization 3 and the war making of Medieval. After playing through a fully-fledged tutorial (a rare thing in these slapdash times, let me tell you) Rome then gives you the chance to confront the main imperial campaign as one of three Roman factions: The Scipii, Julii or Bruti.

While the three don't have any special units or buildings (being, as they are, all Roman), they do have dissimilar tasks. The Bruti are assigned the job of increasing the borders of the Empire to the southeast, destroying the last of the Greek settlements as they go. The Julii are tasked with killing Gauls and taking Germania in what quickly becomes an almost painfully slow fight northwards, while the Scipii get the biggest responsibility, in the form of seizing Carthage to the southwest.

Unfortunately, you can't just go about your business willy-nilly, for at all times you are under the scrutiny of the Roman Senate, and not always are you their favorite son. The Senate has the power to order you around on missions and while, like a real general, you have the power to disobey, this is not always a good idea, for to do so is to lose influence within the Senate, which can and does indeed tend to, come back and bite you on the proverbial.

Rome's legions fend off a division of
man-eating ketchup botttles

If you comply with their (sometimes malicious) orders, rewards in the form of cold hard cash, special military units, not to mention extra influence, are up for grabs, making dealing with the Senate a careful balancing act.

Which brings me to the next item on the agenda. Families.

An enhanced attribute from the very first Total War game, each of the three Roman factions are actually families, and those you assign to govern your cities and captain your armies must be chosen, as such, from your family stock.

With an RPG feel to the proceedings, the many members of your family are good for various things depending on their stats.

For instance, it'd be smart to appoint a family member with a high command rating to a position where command is involved (i.e. as a general), while it would most definitely dumb to give the job to a dude who loves, say, picking his nose.

If your choices are good enough, your family members may be picked for important senate positions, increasing their powers several times over. By the same token, you can surround your family members with lackeys (bodyguards, advisers etc) who can perform various functions.

It's not a massively important addition, but it's cool nonetheless.

The importance of having family members serving in military positions I cannot emphasize enough. Having a general in your army can sometimes be the key factor in determining which army wins the day, and a small army with an high-stat general can usually flog a larger force lacking a general to within an inch of it's life.

Much has been made of Rome's new graphics engine, and I think that now, finally, we can say that all the hype was justified. Leaps and bounds ahead of Medieval's sprite-based armies, you can finally see the effects of your commands in glorious 3D. Soldiers rush down out of the hills in monstrous waves, war elephants trumpet and thunder about, hurling infantry into the sky, catapults send giant chunks of flaming rock to descend upon thine enemy and, really, it's all quite operatic.

Also like an opera, there's normally a terrifically high body count, with legions upon legions (sometimes thousands of soldiers in total) marching to their deaths in sync. The attention to detail is sometimes quite stunning, but what is even more amazing is the relative lack of system lag, even in the midst of fierce combat.

The Romans suit up, square their shoulders
and gird their loins for battle

With a half-decent system, you can just pull back and watch the teeming masses go at it hammer and tongs without even a touch of framerate-drop.

The new camera does, admittedly, take a bit of getting used to, but give it a few days and you'll be panning and scanning like a pro.

When you get through with the single player campaign (a massive undertaking, consisting as it does of roughly six hundred turns), Rome lets you play with a skirmish mode (the wartime equivalent of a TV dinner, quick and satisfying, but more than a tad on the shallow side), or in a few historical campaigns (far shorter than the large single-player effort, yet quite fun).

Multiplayer is also an extremely valid option, with two game modes provided, in the forms of two-player Siege and open-to-all Skirmish.

Siege is the Rome equivalent of Chess, with one player taking up a township and defending it as the other probes the walls for weaknesses. Skirmish, on the other hand, is a quick and dirty "let's get into it, boys" come-one-come-all gorefest, which is sure to impress all and sundry.

Like ice-cold lemonade on a hot day, Rome is the year's best strategy game. Anyway, even if it wasn't, how can you go past a game that lets you set pigs on fire and hurl them at your opponent?

Game: Rome: Total War
Players: 1-multi
Online: Yes
Developer: Creative Assembly
Distributor: Activision

Rating: 90%

(Ratings Key/Explanation)

Rome: Total War is on the shelves now.

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