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.
I was really enjoying this game until I ran up against an wholly broken encounter. Eight enemies, five with greater initiative than myself, who boxed me into the starting area and peppered the area with fog grenades which prevented me from attacking but not them. Nothing like having to skip your turns because you cannot act and watching you entire party that you spent a couple days grooming get cut to pieces. Unbalanced, unfair, unfun. Pity really, because some genuine love went into the game. Writing is better than average, ambiance works, mechanics are a little convoluted but are at least interesting. . .But all of that is wasted if the majority of the game is filled with combat and those encounters are rigged.
Obtuse and buggy.
If guiding the gradual decline of a man's life interests you, then you might enjoy this game. It presents itself as a deterministic endeavor which merely reacts to your decisions, but in reality in manipulates you into corners and toward specific ends. End a chapter with max reputation with all family remember prior to a chapter which deals with family melodrama? Can't have that, your relationships nose dive with three of them for no reason, with no option to prevent, despite the sacrifices you have made on their behalf. Well that is life, right chum? Can't always have it your way! Well, if it were life I might agree, but its not. Its just masochistic drivel. Even if you salvage your relationships after that restoring the unity of your family, avoiding the pitfalls and hazards of petty feuds. . .The results of a quest you slyly sidestepped will be forced upon you regardless of your care and diligence except without the nominal gesture of your participation being offered, In the end all of the choices you are presented with boil down to merely three and it is impossible to have, say, both domestic tranquility and professional success. A game which is concerned with choices and their consequences should not railroad the player into predetermined outcomes.
This is actually a great little game. Very reminiscent of the first Fallout in tonality. A lot of the reviews here were from early access and don't reflect the state of the game at launch. After a couple days and a few hours I have found it stable and a lot of fun.
