I found myself mousing over tiny icons and waiting for tooltips to pop up even hours into my campaign, which is absurd. The stylized approach to Rome II has been toned back a bit, but there are still plenty of icons that are completely unintuitive. Like at any moment, if I do the wrong thing or touch the big red button, this could be the turn where it crashes again.
It’s like the whole thing was spooled together with duct-tape-I’ve only had one outright crash, which isn’t too bad, but the game always seems right on the verge of crashing. “Did the Western Roman Empire just attack…wait, what’s going on here?” You can never really tell, which forces you to zoom out and take stock of the AI factions after control is returned to you each turn. The game is trying to show you what the AI is doing while also trying to calculate turns for three-dozen different factions at the same time, so it gives you this weird five frames per second, skipping, halting, creaking imitation of one or two parts of the AI’s turn where you can sort of tell what’s going on but not really. The AI turns are also just as janky as they were in Rome II. This is with an Intel Core i5-3570K and a Nvidia GeForce GTX 970-a fairly beefy configuration well within the game’s recommended specs. I’ve also had the game outright freeze after the AI takes its turn, sitting on a weird white fog-screen for twenty seconds while the game struggles to return control to me. If I’m reaching for my phone to kill time in between turns, there’s a problem. I’ve had AI turns last upwards of thirty seconds at times, which is entirely too long in my opinion. “Yeah, this all sounds good,” you’re thinking, “but how does it run?” Rome II was an unmitigated disaster at launch and for multiple months afterward.Īttila isn’t quite as bad, but there are still rough edges. If you’re coming to Attila with a bit of trepidation, I don’t blame you. So let’s talk about Total War: Rome II, this game’s immediate predecessor. This leaves you at a disadvantage if you want to play any of the horde-style factions-you’re learning on the fly. You take over the Visigoths, but in a scenario where they’ve already settled into a city. Which makes it all the stranger that the tutorial for the game, the so-called “prologue,” focuses on traditional Total War gameplay. Playing as a “normal” faction feels clunky and unrefined by comparison. The ultra-mobile hordes have a few disadvantages-particularly their slow population growth and the fact that you can’t be building and waging war at the same time-but ultimately it feels like the whole game was designed around this concept. It’s a new way to breathe life into Total War. It’s a fascinating way to play Total War. Many of the remaining areas are under my control by proxy, as tribute states. Between the Huns slowly destroying the Eastern Roman Empire and me the West, we’ve reduced parts of Europe to nothingness. In Attila the map is slowly turning one color, but it’s the pale parchment yellow that signifies a “blank” tile-another city razed to the ground. In past Total War games you’d slowly see the map congeal into two or three colors as mighty empires were forged. It’s the ultimate historical David and Goliath story-bands of roving barbarians slowly crumbling the great Roman Empire, with its poetry and aqueducts and roads, into forgotten dust.Īnd I don’t know how I feel about that. It’s about burning empires to the ground.
TOTAL WAR ROME 2 SPECS SERIES
The “Total War” series title has never seemed more appropriate. All this without having a single city under my direct control. Doing so is a massive shift though, and upon doing it at one point I decided to reload and go straight back to my campaign of destruction. At any time in the campaign you can conquer a city and decide to settle down in it, ending your migratory phase. In past Total War games it was “conquer as many cities as possible and grow the empire.” Here, though, I’m left with a style of play that actively rejects cities. I didn’t even really have an end-goal in sight.
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