Expeditions: Rome Review (Shockwave)
Expeditions: Viking was a pleasant surprise for me when I picked it up in a sale a few years back so I was keen to see how Rome turned out and for the most part it's a good follow up title. Much like Viking, there are some definite flaws but on the whole they don't ruin the overall experience.
On the positive side, the new setting fits very well with the style of the game. It allows for a good variety of characters and environments while retaining at least a semblance of historical accuracy. Now there's a pretty big caveat to that which is that numerous events and people all co-exist in the game world which in real life were in some cases many hundreds of years apart, but the game is not attempting to be a history lesson so I think this can be forgiven. Graphically everything just looks 'ok'. Environments and characters look the part, there's not a huge amount of detail and you'll see a lot of repeating objects and textures, but it's functional. Likewise the sound is 'ok'. The music sets the scene unobtrusively, although I did find the battle music became rather repetitive. Voice acting is fairly good for a low budget title and the various characters you meet are much more well developed than in Viking. The overall storyline is quite interesting and engaging and the villains are developed enough that you really want to beat them as the game plays out.
One big improvement is that the super annoying time limit on the main campaign which really hurt enjoyment in Viking is now gone so you can take as much time as you like working through side quests and so on in Rome. Unfortunately, perhaps the most notable new mechanic in Rome is also one of the game's weakest points. Namely, the campaign battle system in which you command legions to conquer new territory for Rome. The problem with this system is really twofold. Firstly, it's extremely basic and while there are a variety of tactics you can employ which will affect the battle outcome to a certain extent, it basically boils down to whoever has the bigger army will win, and as the player you will almost always have the bigger army. Secondly, there are FAR too many of these battles over the course of the game. If you had to do it a handful of times it would potentially be a nice enough addition, but you'll end up fighting probably a hundred battles like this in a thorough playthrough and they rapidly become extremely repetitive. The only saving grace is that they are very short, taking only a couple of minutes to complete and you can skip through the individual sequences to make them even quicker than that if you want to.
The rest of the game will be familiar to anyone who played Viking or other tactical RPG style games. Overworld movement and exploration is pretty clunky and slow but the actual map looks a lot nicer than before and there's a decent amount of exploration to do. The party battles are by far the most enjoyable aspect of the game and these are handled well overall. Your characters develop progressively so the difficulty remains relatively steady throughout although I will say there are a couple of specific storyline battle encounters where the difficulty suddenly spikes dramatically which is another frustration carried over from the earlier games in this series. The battle interface is mostly quite clear and easy to interpret however one issue I had was it is quite difficult to tell at a glance which character you are actually in control of at a given moment because the coloured ring that denotes the active character doesn't stand out very well from everything else on the screen, and in keeping with the game's historical themes your various characters will often look quite similar to each other with the armour or clothing they're wearing. I usually had to resort to double clicking on the character portrait to centre the camera on them to figure out who I was controlling.
To sum up, if you're a fan of the previous Expeditions games, or tactical RPGs in general, you'll most probably find enough to like with Rome to warrant a purchase. It's not flawless, but it's sufficiently different from the various other titles in this genre to be worth a look. Hopefully we'll see another game in this series some day.