Posted on: January 25, 2022
Elkor_Alish
Verified ownerGames: 298 Reviews: 56
Rough
Both RPG and RTS promise a degree of autonomy, the suggestion of risk, reward, and reactivity to actions taken within the game. This title, however, has very narrow parameters which discourage meaningful play let alone player agency. You have a set objective, try anything else -such as preserving a fleet instead of burning it or appropriating arms being smuggled by your adversaries instead of burning them and the game just sends waves of enemy reinforcements until you succumb to sheer boredom since they are usually insufficient to even pose a proper challenge (on normal). Your legion starts at half strength. Want to bring it back up to full? No matter how few or how many casualties you take in any given combat, you will be attacked every time you cross the 3/4 mark and knocked back down to half strength. Your legion can gain experience. Does it make any difference? No. Does morale make any noticeable difference? No. Do the cards (sorry, "tactics") make any difference? Not really. Big army wins. I will say that compared to prior titles in the Expeditions line, there is improvement. Previous games were pretty linear and lacked reactivity. There is a genuine attempt to make something special, sadly that effort is mostly squandered by conventional industry standard and consumer safe design choices. The voice acting is terrific, the effort to incorporate our best idea how the Roman language sounded (accented for English of course) is lovely for instance. However, in persuading others, you can't be witty, charming, and driven. You have to choose one, which will lock you into that path and out of all others. It would have been far more interesting, say, to have dynamic dialogues where you have to try and figure out what sort of approach was most likely to work with guarded, jaded, and intelligent adversaries instead of just being relegated into predetermined outcomes based upon arbitrary criteria. Could have been great, but as it stands its simply a little under par.
Is this helpful to you?
