And dreams of a quick campaign across Europe quickly fade, and a weariness creeps in.

I'd hoped the intervening 20 years might have whittled these right down, but they haven't. There's still a noticeable wait while other factions take their turns, and still a noticeable wait looking at loading screens before battles. The new views: both very useful!īut it's still quite slow, the game. And there's a new tier of zoom you can scroll out to, which shows the campaign map in a simplified and much more readable colour-coded view, and the battle map in a simplified armies-are-icons view. Among them are new overview menus for seeing everything at a glance: your empire, your agents, your armies. However, the Remaster does make some improvements in this area. More to the point, I remember how laborious managing an empire in this game can be, individually fiddling with taxes and build-queues, turn after turn. Yes, this is very satisfying! Take that, Gondegusulus! I could try hiding those Celts in the trees again but will the thrill be as strong a second time? Well let's see shall we? Yes, this is quite satisfying (if you excuse my dead dogs). There aren't many surprises left here for me there weren't that many to begin with, to be frank. 'I've still got it!' It's a gentle and warm memory to spend time in again.īut the more I remember, the more I realise I know where it's all going, and the sunny sepia tone starts to fade. 'Oh, yes, and this does this - I remember!' Lots of that. It makes playing Rome Remastered feel like sliding a familiar board game out from under a cupboard and being giddy with rediscovery for a weekend or two. It's much more likely Creative Assembly is apologising for Rome being a bit dumber than a modern Total War game. Watch on YouTube There are quite a lot of graphical improvements in the game. I'm assured it will also work properly for everyone else, and that it was a problem limited to the press-build of the game. The problem was apparently due to updated AMD drivers, and I've been in constant contact with the Rome Remastered team and they've come up with a fix.

I didn't want to publish anything until it was fixed. Sorry for the slight delay publishing this piece but I've been suffering from a nasty case of crash-to-desktop every time I manually try to fight a battle in the game. They don't make them like this any more!' Crash issues How I clucked with excitement when I read that! 'Oh this is the proper stuff!' I snorted. But Rome Remastered: it even has a warning when you begin, saying sorry but it does some things differently to what you're used to now. And whenever I'm confronted with one of them, I wither. They've had years to get their audiences used to more features, more nuance, more depth. These kinds of games seem much more complicated today. It's really nice not to have to figure out the winning formula again. But it's still unmistakably what it once was, that game I remember, and there's something so unbelievably comforting in going back.

Availability: Out 29th April on Steam (and half-price if you own the old game)Īnd now it's back! Back as Total War: Rome - Remastered, and smartened up for 2021, with some new graphical effects, higher definition this and that, bigger resolutions, gameplay improvements, and (probably most importantly) more factions than ever to try and win as.

Developer: Feral Interactive, Creative Assembly.

It was the height of my war-mongering hubris, the sort of outrageous odds one attempts after spending many a happy weekend waging war across Europe in pleated Roman skirts. For a moment, it was very Braveheart, until their reinforcements arrived and trampled me, but we don't talk about that. My favourite moment was the time I hid a tiny Celt army in the woods and baited a much larger Romano-British army there, then sprung a trap to break their morale so I could chop them up. In my day it was called Rome: Total War, and I poured hours into it.

Total war rome remastered review