izigame.me

Definitely my personal GOTY. Expeditions: Rome is the best entry in the series by far. It's a great mix of TRPG and CRPG with shockingly high production values and overall polish. The visuals are beautiful and the game runs quite well for the most part. The more large scale battles can dip down occasionally with all of the fire and particle effects, but I've only encountered one glitch that was easily fixed with a save reload. Every single NPC is fully voice acted except your character (which I prefer in RPG's). The portraits are all large and detailed for every major character. The soundtrack and sound design as a whole are excellent. It's epic in scale and attacks sound really meaty especially when you gore the enemy. Environments are varied and full of detail. You find yourself leading a conquest in Greece, Africa, and Gallia, with breaks in between each act where you can address personal matters in Rome.
Bells and whistles aside, the core aspects (imo) of a great RPG are almost all there. It's important to remember that this is NOT a pure CRPG, so don't expect much exploration. If you're expecting Baldur's Gate or Divinity, this is not exactly that. It has elements of that. The overworld map is mainly just for leading your legion which is unfortunately the worst part of the game. There are a few small towns/cities you can explore a little with only a handful of fairly simple side quests to complete. All companions have their own questlines you can solve as you see fit and they're all well-written, but not that challenging. The customization is very in-depth. It's not fantastical at all (mostly), but they still managed to pull off a good variety of classes, skills, and weapons that other fantasy/sci-fi TRPGs fail at. You can choose between the assassin, soldier, support, and archer class. While that may not sound like a lot, each class has three unique skill trees per class you can mix and match to your liking with weapons that have their own unique skills as well. Trust me. No two praetorians of the same class will play the same. The combat, unsurprisingly, is the highlight here. If you're familiar with XCOM: EU, this will be familiar, but it's the synergy between classes that really sells it. Supports can attack over the heads of soldiers blocking enemies from the front. Archers can use soldiers as a form of cover with the Bulwark skill. Supports can use Inspire to give the assassin his action point back to flank an enemy a soldier is attacking to reduce their resistances (slashing, piercing, bludgeoning) to 0% to do full damage and setup the archer to use Assist to attack the enemy and trigger attacks of opportunity from all adjacent allies around said enemy. Hopefully, that gives you an idea on what I mean.
The narrative is enthralling to the say the least. It's full of political intrigue, humor, drama, revenge, personal relationships (including romantic), and it's the kind of story that we don't get often in most self-proclaimed RPGs. It's a story about YOU, not some punk rocker AI stuck in your head. You control your own ambitions and you hold the lives of your companions in your hands. Your multiple conquests will only succeed if you lead them properly. You determine who leads the nations you conquer, what companions will follow you, and even hold political influence in Rome. I won't spoil it, but the endings are great.
However, there are flaws and they almost sap the fun out of the game entirely. Random annoying events will occur when time is passing in the overworld map. They are varied and they mostly suck. It's mainly the many events that cause injury, take away resources INCLUDING WEAPONS AND ARMOR, and throw you into unavoidable combat with a random selection of companions. These wouldn't be so bad, if the negative effects were based on some sort of decision you made, but they don't. You just get told some of your companions have been hit with some terrible injury and injuries can be brutal. They sometimes take days to recover from and you don't want to fight with an injury. The debuffs are too painful. The other major issue is with the atrocious legion combat. The actual, boots on the ground, squad-based combat is phenomenal. The legion combat is not. It initially was complete nonsense with little to no control and boring as hell. They patched it based on the feedback to make it better. Now it makes sense, but is still boring, with a little more control, and lots of random nonsense. All you do is select a centurion to lead the attack and go through four stages of selecting one of three "stratagem" cards while mashing the spacebar to skip through the boring visual of icons shuffling on screen. This part of the game was so clearly an after thought, it makes me wonder why they even bothered. The game would be 100% better without it. It's not hard at all. Just pick the cards that keep morale up and risk to centurions/commanders down. These battles take up at least half of the game and it unfortunately brings the game down from being a masterpiece.
If you can look past these blemishes, you'll have what I feel is the best Ancient Rome game ever made. After the disappointing launches of Imperator Rome and Rome 2: Total War, this game actually lived up to expectations and exceeded them. While this game may not execute the grand strategy mechanics as well as these games, it does execute its narrative and micro managed large scale battles/sieges like no other. It's a strong recommendation from me. I give it a 9/10. It's worth the money. My 90+ hour playtime was just for one playthrough.