Total War: ROME REMASTERED Review by DOUGLAS_MACLEOD

Rome Total War Remastered: Total Ownage



Has it been this long? Creative Assembly and their Total War franchise has been around long enough that they're now remastering their classic titles? In the case of RTW, yes, yes it has.

This review comes 4 years after RTWR was first released, so while it's not as "retroactive" as my other reviews, it's still been long enough that the dust has settled on this title, and we can go back and take a look

1. Story

RTWR boasts three different games: Rome Total War and it's two expansions, Barbarian Invasion and Alexander. RTW is set during the rise of the Roman Republic, beginning in 270 BC. Players have numerous factions to choose from, including three different roman factions, Gauls, Carthage, Greeks, Germans, and a whole swath of other peoples, from ancient Britain to the Middle East. This is the infancy of the Roman Republic: it had faced challenges (including conquering Italy, and being sacked by the Gauls in 390 B.C), but now it faced enemies on the world stage. Barbarians, the Macedonian Greek successor states of Alexander's empire, the wily and clever Carthaginians, and the horse bound Parthians. Whether players take on the role of a Roman or non-Roman faction, they are in for a challenge. As any one of the Roman factions, not only will a player have to contend with the various enemies of Rome (Gauls, Greeks, and Carthaginians, oh my!), but they'll eventually have to face off against the other Roman factions too. When the
player's faction becomes too strong, the Roman Senate (an A.I. faction) will make absurd demands of the player, ultimately forcing the player into war against their fellow Romans. This was a clever feature by the developers, which they used in order to simulate the civil wars of the late Roman Republic - which inevitably transformed into the Roman Empire.

Barbarian Invasion is set in the last century of the western Roman Empire, beginning in 363 AD. Whereas RTW showcased the beginning of Rome and the numerous enemies it faced in the ancient world, BI takes us to a broken Roman Empire. Divided in two, after numerous civil wars and politics finally split the Empire between east and west, players are witness to a dying kingdom. They also have a plethora of factions to choose from, including the Western Roman Empire, Eastern Roman Empire, numerous German barbarian factions, Celts, Sassanid Persians, and various nomadic groups, including the Slavs, Sarmatians, and the fearsome Huns. As a Roman faction, you'll find your unit roster is not nearly as powerful as the Roman factions were in RTW. Both factions also begin with their respective empires, with the WRE controlling everything from Britain, to Iberia, to Italy and north Africa. The ERE occupies the Balkans, much of the middle east, and Egypt. Meanwhile, their enemies wait with baited breath at their borders. As said before, numerous Germanic factions are present, including the Franks, Alemanni, Saxons, Goths, Lombards, and more. To the east, the Sassanid Persians have risen in power, threatening the ERE, and in the far north lay the greatest threat: the Huns. Meanwhile to the south, replacing the Carthaginians as a threat in North Africa are the Berbers. As a Roman faction, players must not only defend their borders, but counter-attack their enemies, and eventually contend with their Roman cousins too. As a non-Roman faction, players must grow their kingdom, so they must war against other barbarian peoples....or invade the Roman Empire.

In Alexander, players are taken back to antiquity, to the 4th century B.C, as they take up the role of Alexander the Great. Beginning in the 330s, players begin in Macedonia, occupying only a few regions in Greece, and are pitted against the mighty Persian Empire. While RTW and BI are set around greater Europe, from Britain to the middle east to north Africa and everything in-between, the map in Alexander is set from Greece and Egypt in the west, to Afghanistan and India in the east. In addition to the Persians, players must also contend with various barbarian groups, from the Balkans to central Asia.

2. Gameplay

The Total War series plays out much like Civilization, albeit with real time battles. Like Civilization, Total War makes use of 4x. You've got the world map, city management, empire/diplomacy management, and military management. Everything goes hand in hand. The key to building a functioning empire is wealth, and that begins with developing your cities and increasing their financial output, by building mines, farms, roads, markets, and harbors (coastal cities only). Of course, in order to gain more cities you must conquer them militarily, so you need wealth to build an army, and a general to lead it. Your generals come from your faction's family tree; they can either be adopted into the family, marry into, or be born to your married men and women. So, let's get to it!

- City management: While Civilization allowed players and AI to roam and found their own cities, in TW settlements are already set. It's simply up to the player and AI factions to take them. You have a plethora of improvements to build, including barracks, blacksmiths, archery ranges, stables, religious centers, farms, mines, defensive structures, and more. Maintaining public order and a garrison is necessary to keeping your settlements. By constructing civic buildings and such, you can improve your public order or deal directly with specific problems (plumbing and basic sanitation to counter public health issues, for example). Training up a garrison can also maintain public order, as well as to defend against enemy attack.

- World map: The main eyes and ears of the player, from here you can view your empire, as well as to observe neighbors, enemies, and hostile armies. You can move your armies and agents about here as well. In your cities, you build up troops, but also agents: these are specialized units that have various purposes; spies, assassins, diplomats, and merchants.

- Empire management: The broad overview, wise players not only keep track of their family tree (including manually picking your faction heir, a feature which was removed in M2TW), but of their diplomacy as well. Should you attack an ally of one of your allies, you will end up losing your alliance. In some cases you can also convince weaker kingdoms to become vassals to your own.

- Battle: The real reason why anyone plays TW is for the real time battles. Civilization has their skirmish-like world map battles, Crusader Kings has their battles by numbers, but Total War is all about real time carnage and slaughter. Before battle you're able to organize and deploy your troops any way you see fit. There are several pre-made formations to choose from as well. In total war, you must think like an actual commander and use real tactics. Rain fire arrows on enemy formations to whittle their numbers - and morale - down first before committing to a melee. Use forests to ambush enemy troops, keep your troops on defense so they don't come out of formation, charge your cavalry downhill to better smash apart enemy forces, etc etc. Additionally, mastering your various types of troops - both friendly and hostile - is a necessity. Use spearmen to deal with enemy cavalry, but beware horse archers, who can easily lure your men into a trap. Instead, counter cavalry archers with archers of your own. Use your heavy cavalry to flank and break enemy formations, but beware close range artillery, as well as anti-cavalry troops. Use cavalry archers to screen your oncoming infantry from enemy archers, but ensure your horsemen don't get stuck in a melee. Beware of charging up an enemy hill, lest your infantry get tired and rout after only moments of battle. This isn't just rock-paper-scissors type of combat you'll see with any regular RTS games like Age of Empires 2, this is real time tactics on large scale maps. Every second and every unit counts, but ultimately it's up to the player to guide the troops to victory.

Your troops can be upgraded too, by retraining them in cities with blacksmiths (armor/weapon upgrades), as well as from certain religious shrines (which can add extra damage and skill). Troops can also gain experience from battle too, noted by chevrons (bronze, silver, and gold) on their unit card. These increase the units attack damage as well armor/defense ratings.

The other beautiful thing about battles is the terrain itself. No matter where you fight, the real time battlefield retains continuity of the surrounding environment. You're asking yourself "what does that even mean?" What that means is, for example, if you attack an enemy army on the coast, the battlefield will be on the beach. If there's an island off the coast (like Rhodes, off the coast of Turkey), you'll spot it off in the distance. If you attack an enemy army on a forest tile, the battlefield will be heavily wooded, allowing your troops (and the enemy's) to hide and conceal themselves for an ambush. If you attack an enemy army outside a city, on the battlefield you'll be able to see the city off in the distance. The list goes on. The player isn't just given some random seed map, the battlefields are static and representative of the actual terrain and environs of where you attacked. It's a great part of the game, and part of the charm and allure of both the original RTW, and the remastered version.

- Unit rosters: Every faction has a roster of units they can train up to fight in battle, anything from melee infantry to archers to cavalry and siege weapons. While a large majority of units are palette-swapped carbon copies, most of the factions have some unit that was unique to their kingdom. Romans of course have legionnaires, Greeks have hoplites, the Franks have throwing axemen, etc.

- Religion: While religion played out in the original MTW, it was excluded from RTW. At most, having temples to different gods other than your own would incur a culture penalty to public order, but that was it. Religion was reintroduced in BI, showcasing the divide between the old world's Paganism, and the new world's Catholicism. Whether playing as the Romans or barbarians, the player can choose to practice Paganism or Christianity, depending on the temples or churches they build in individual cities. So players can add even more historical twists to their campaigns: a Pagan Roman Empire, a Catholic Germanic kingdom, etc. Meanwhile, the Persian Sassanid empire to the east practices Zoroastrianism.

- Hordes: Another new feature to BI, this allows various barbarian factions (Huns, Sarmatians, Franks, etc) to become nomadic, abandoning their settlements and becoming fully mobile armies. This was introduced as a way to simulate the barbarian migrations of the later Roman empire, specifically the Huns and the various Germanic peoples they pushed west into Roman territory. A faction can horde in two different ways: either by manually abandoning their settlement (and clicking the "horde" option, which really is only for the player), OR by losing their last settlement to enemy conquest. This forces the horde to spawn several army stacks, which can move in any direction. As a horde, a faction ignores borders, sacks settlements at random, until the horde either settles in a new city or is destroyed completely. This is a handy feature for players: abandon your faction's smelly old barbarian settlement, and invade directly into more rich and prosperous territories, like Italy, Greece, Egypt, etc. This can make for some dynamic twists: imagine the Huns ignoring Europe and invading south into the Middle East, conquering everything there before moving along North Africa into Roman Iberia. Imagine the Franks heading east and conquering Greece from the Eastern Romans. Or simulate real history: play as the Vandals and migrate to North Africa, play as the Goths and conquer Italy. The possibilities and replay factor is massive.

Hordes would later be used again in M2TW, notoriously with the Mongols and the later Timurids.

- QOL updates and features: As this is a remaster of RTW, the developers would be remiss if they failed to update the game. Besides basic QOL updates, they retrofitted the game with night battles (first introduced in BI but previously lacking in RTW), achievements, and even added in the 'merchant' agent unit that was first introduced in M2TW. The UI has been modified too (though I'd hardly call this an update as the original UI was charming, more on that later). One of the new features is the ability to transfer your retinue members (these are small supporting characters and objects that are owned by your generals on the world map) to other family members without having to co-locate your family members in one
location. In vanilla, in order to transfer a retinue member from one general to the other, you'd have to have them be physically located on the same tile in the world map (stacked together in an army or city). Now you just go into a sub-menu, click a retinue, order it transferred to a different general, and it will arrive within a few turns (depending on the distance between your two generals). All factions have been unlocked to boot, as many were AI specific (like the Celts and Macedonians, and some horde factions from BI like the Slavs and Romano-British). While it was always possible to simply go into the game files and do a quick fix, now every faction is playable (except for the Rebels and S.P.Q.R of course).

The coolest part with all this is the achievements. Provided you still have your original RTW/BI/Alex saves, you can actually copy and paste them into the RTWR save folder, load each one up, and continue your save files in RTWR. In just one day, I knocked out 25% of the achievements by simply loading up my saves (which were all endgame saves), completing each one (auto-resolve battles FTW), and earned a whole chunk of achievements in less than an hour. Boom done!

- Steam workshop: Most titles nowadays come with mod support, and often times are easily equipped with mods from the steam workshop. This is great because as enjoyable as RTW is, having a few mods to enhance the gameplay makes it perfect.

3. Cons

That said, any major title (especially from Creative Assembly and their remaster developers, Feral) is not without faults.

Yes...this game is a remaster. The actual definition of reboots and remasters and whatnot has been debated by gamers, but the general idea is that a remaster is just one big QOL update, complete with a graphics update. Basically a fresh coat of paint and a hammer to straighten out some dents. So when this game was released, there was a lot of argument that it simply didn't do enough...yet, as we discussed, it's JUST a remaster. Sooo....what's the big deal?

There's a couple things. For one, the UI was pointlessly modified. I say "modified" and not "updated" because the new UI didn't improve the original, in fact it made it more complicated. Sub-menus within the main menu, sub-menus from VERY SPECIFIC sections, things like that. I play Total War for its straight forward approach, not Crusader Kings which terrorizes gamers with its plethora of menus and real time chaos. Additionally, the UI changed everything around, including the mini-map and everything else. So there's one.

The graphics received some updates but overall the game is still much the cartoonish look and feel of the original. But that's the charm of RTW.

Now, remaster vs. reboot. We know the game is a remaster. But, here's the thing. It was retrofitted with the merchant agent unit from M2TW. If the devs are going to add in features from other TW games....why not go all the way. I'm talking real time naval battles (along with naval sieges of coastal cities), army unit emblems and bonuses, unique city layouts (Carthage, for example), basically all the features from Rome 2 Total War that made that game great (and none of the trash that made it....trash). And for that matter, why not sharpen up the unit rosters too? Many of the non-Roman factions unit rosters are so absurdly underpowered and unoriginal (again, palette-swapped carbon copies) that one might only play them for the novelty of it, rather than for the fun factor. For example, in BI, the Roxolani have nearly the same unit roster as the Sarmatians; likewise, the Goths, Vandals, and Slavs are almost completely identical (unless I'm mistaken, none of them have their own unique units anyway so they really are carbon copies of each other) . It's only when we reach the western European barbarians that we begin to find some unit variety, notably with the Anglo-Saxons, Franks, Alemanni, and Celts. The WRE and ERE, while they naturally have many units in common, also have many unique units of their own, but RTW/BI is about the Romans anyway so of course they're naturally overpowered regardless. While RTW sports it's own share of carbon copy units (especially Greek hoplites, given how much Greek culture spread throughout the eastern Mediterranean), fortunately each faction feels unique enough that the few "clone" units there are don't matter much.

Something needs to be said about Alexander. Unfortunately that expansion is still trash. The campaign begins with some narration but then you never hear it again. You'd expect there to be some overarching historical narrative but there's none. India is still unreachable unless by boat. Additionally, despite the real-life Alexander having many notable generals (many of whom would later partition the empire and have kingdoms of their own after Alexander's death), the game only ever gives you one - Parmenion. Coincidentally, there was a Civilization game many years ago that featured an Alexander campaign: Civilization: Call to Power 2. A civ-knockoff game by Activision, it was the first turn based 4x game to feature an Alexander campaign...which sported at least several of his generals. And before I forget, India, As previously mentioned, you can only reach it by boat (let's ignore that Alexander crossed into India via the Hindu Kush and Himalayas but whatever). And when you do get there, rather than facing a vast Indian army led by King Porus, complete with war elephants, you just get some random city. After a quick siege, that's that. Wildly anticlimactic and underwhelming.

Finally...historical accuracy. One of the biggest cons of the original RTW was the completely absurd depiction of Egypt. During the period the game was set in, Egypt was Hellenic, under the rule of the Ptolemies; it was a Greek Kingdom. What did players deal with instead? Pharaonic Egypt - the land of the Pharaohs. Over the years many mods were created to give players a more historically accurate playthrough, but the damage was done. So with the release of the remaster, was Egypt fixed up to be in-line with its Greek dynasty?...NOPE. "Retconning" in a remaster is not a new concept. 2019's Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition fixed many of the old campaigns, by retroactively replacing various factions in the story mode with the newly added factions from The Forgotten expansion (Magyars as the Hungarians, Slavs as the Poles and Russians, etc). So why not fix the Egyptians then??

Now, some of you might be reading all this and going "but it's a basic remaster! Can't change the whole thing!" Well, guess what. The developers also gave the player the option to switch on & off all the various features. If you want to play the game vanilla like it's 2004, go for it. Want to play it with some nice upgrades, have fun. So for all the little things they added, they could have done so much more, because at the end of the day...it's all optional and up to the player's preference. So there you have it.

4. Conclusion

Like the release of the Star Wars sequel trilogy in 2015-19, the developers had ONE CHANCE to really spruce up the product and give fans a stellar, phenomenal game that would not only please Total War vets, but also entice new players too. Think of what we could have had - naval battles, elite armies with unique emblems, the works! Feral just didn't go far enough.

Instead we got a very barebones remaster, that aside from a few very basic fixes and QOL updates, doesn't offer much else. Feral made great strides in updating the game but there is a lot to be desired here too. Personally, I'll keep playing it because it at least adds achievements and fixes some of the irksome bugs in the original (siege tower bug especially), but otherwise I wouldn't recommend the game to players. But then, maybe my standards are too high? Maybe the majority of TW players love a basic remaster of a classic? I think I've been pretty straight forward here. Take RTWR for what it is - a very basic remaster, no more, no less.