REVIEW- Expeditions: Rome the turn-based strategy/RPG continues from the previous episodes but with a slightly broader scope, as players are given more choices. However, if you’re not a fan of the franchise, you may not be in Rome for long, which is why Expeditions: Rome is perhaps a divisive game, and that’s putting it mildly…?

Productive week, handbrake (which causes the car to somersault twice in the air but land on its wheels), I’ll write this and return to productive week.

Roman Explorations I.

There is no shortage of management, as the third part of Expeditions is on a similar level to the previous two parts, Expeditions: Conquistador (which came out in 2013) and Expeditions: Viking (which is from 2017, if I’m not mistaken). You could call it micromanagement, but it might be worth it if you can take a region. Until then, it’s not an easy journey, as turn-based gameplay has its downsides. Suppose there is an X per cent chance that your unit (formation) can finish off the enemy. X is not always 100; it can be less. If it somehow misses, and you can prepare for that mentally; the other unit has the same chance, X per cent, of killing us. It’s part of the genre; you can’t neglect it. Does it cause tension? Yes.

But before that, it’s probably worth getting our army to a better level. You need to improve the army itself, and you also need resources. But if we are moving, the clock is ticking forward, which (if we are not careful or not planning enough) can often result in fighting the enemy at the worst possible time. It’s very much like what we saw in XCOM, and let’s just say that there are two sides to the coin, and sometimes heads, sometimes tails, but one thing is for sure: the learning curve is something that everyone has to climb. You better get prepared, as the game can become quite relentless early on.

And outside of the fighting, there’s a whole host of decisions to be made. There will be traitors. We will have the chance to forgive them. Often, though, they will still stab us in the back, leaving our dear Legatus to ponder about life and death. Who knows what would have happened if we had given the traitor we just executed a second chance? They also contribute to the random factor: our choices affect the difficulty of the next mission. If you were doing quite well up to that point, you might hit a pothole because of a bad decision, but if you’ve just barely survived it all, a good decision can give your career a boost. But that sounds too good so far, doesn’t it? Well… I usually split the two pages in Word into two parts: I tend to cover the positives on the first page, so let’s get to the negatives.

Roman Explorations II.

…and there are quite a few of them. For example, the big battle scenes are depicted with two-dimensional paper figures. I think this sight might be shocking to the untrained gamer at first. Still, perhaps it’s also a clue that Logic Artists laid the foundations through community funding (Expeditions: Conquistador was created with Kickstarter). The audiovisuals are average, and that’s all it is in every sense of the word. Expeditions: Rome feels unfinished. How can I describe it when a character has a name but no face? How can I define it as equipment upgrades resulting in minimal enhancements? How do I talk about how skills similarly fail to perform to what might be expected of them? And some of them, I think, is rather harmful. One archery skill allows you to reveal characters in an area… but opponents can quickly move away, often followed by the execution of the archer involved. And with this skill, you can waste a turn. Wow, what a great design for this skill!

Oh, and all of this will be felt quite strongly in the game, which will take tens of hours to play through. I’m not kidding: originally, Logic Artists said it would take approximately forty hours to play through Expeditions: Rome. Well, I think that’s just for the developers: it’s not an exaggeration to say that I think it’s more like fifty hours for the bare mouse-and-keyboard player. And in the meantime, not much has happened in terms of character creation that isn’t good. Expeditions: Viking has already been criticised for this element (justifiably), but here we are. The plague outside has no say in this as a possible excuse.

ChRome

I don’t think Expeditions: Rome deserves a seven out of ten if observed from a distance, but in the meantime, a double score should be in order… for anyone who likes the series, consider the score an eight out of ten. I still can’t give it a higher than a six-and-a-half because there hasn’t been any significant improvement since Expeditions: Viking, but for those who like strategic, thoughtful gameplay and Roman battles set in the first century BC, this game will still be an appropriate choice. However, this group of players may not be in the majority. After this game, the biggest disappointment would be Elasto Mania Remastered NOT having that bubbly sound effect when you fail…

-V-

Publisher: THQ Nordic (Embracer Group)

Developer: Logic Artists

Genre: turn-based strategy

Release date: January 20, 2022