Expeditions: Rome Review - Page 4
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On top of your class skills and weapon skills, you'll also be able to pack two tactical items per character, with an extra tactical slot for the stuff you pick up during a mission. These items range from javelins and throwing knives to inspiring banners and stat-raising booze. Tactical items tend to have limited charges that you can only restore by visiting your camp, but in return, they don't cost any action points and can turn the tide of many a battle.
And just in general, the game's combat, while seemingly straightforward, has plenty of complexity under the hood with multiple skills synergizing with each other, flanking, attacks of opportunity, shields completely deflecting arrows but not when they're on fire or shot from this particular unique bow, and so on.
None of it feels overwhelming, but once you figure it all out, results in some very satisfying moments where you go on a rampage completely obliterating the enemy squad in a single turn.
That is not to say that the game is easy. It has four difficulty presets with optional permadeath and ironman modes. I was playing on Hard, which is the second to last difficulty, and the game didn't feel too challenging, but wasn't a complete cakewalk, especially early on. Still, if you know what you're doing and are looking for a challenge, you should probably go for the hardest difficulty straight away.
Technical Information
Unlike the previous Expeditions games, Rome uses the Unreal Engine, which results in a greater visual fidelity paired with overall better performance. And the best part is, once the game is running at a satisfying level, it will do so regardless of whether you're in some desert oasis with two shacks and three NPCs, or in a massive city block with a lot of stuff going on all at once.
On top of that, while Viking launched in a fairly poor state and was plagued with various issues, apart from a couple of minor visual glitches and scripting errors, I've not encountered a single game-breaking bug or crash during my playthrough.
The game is fairly quick to save and load, and while it has multiple rotating quick and autosave slots, there's currently no way to adjust their amount, which can result in way too many save files after a while. It's a minor annoyance, but an annoyance nonetheless.
In general, the game has a few of those, like the fact you can't resize the UI, the camera's insistence on resetting to some default position after you were able to tilt it just right, or some fairly obscure mechanics like legion experience that tends to go up and down seemingly for no reason whatsoever.
The game is fully voice-acted. And while usually I don't really like this feature, here, a certain feline priestess aside, all the voices fit their characters really well. Plus, seeing how lately games with limited voice acting have been confusing bloated writing with good writing, having every word cost money may be a good thing.
Finally, while overall Rome looks much better than its predecessors, the one area where this isn't the case are the game's character portraits. It's honestly baffling how we could go from Conquistador, which had fantastic character art, to Rome, where the portraits are so bland and mechanical, it feels like an AI drew them. Beyond just that, those portraits are presented to you as these flat cardboard cutouts usually indicative of visual novels, which makes the whole thing look way cheaper than it actually is.
And beyond even that, the artists here seem to have given up halfway through, and as a result, some characters don't even have portraits, and instead glare at you as some ominous dark silhouette. And those portraits that do exist oftentimes don't exactly correspond with the game. Like there's this smith character who you can praise for his big bushy beard. Only the character's portrait doesn't have a beard and instead presents us with a guy sporting at best a 5 o'clock shadow.
Conclusion
Some minor gripes aside, if you liked both Conquistador and Viking, you should get Expeditions: Rome right this very moment. If you liked Conquistador but not Viking, you should probably still get it, as there's way more Conquistador DNA in Rome than there is in Viking. If you liked Viking but not Conquistador, you'll be pleased to hear that Rome continues to advance the big picture formula of the series, while proving that streamlining doesn't need to be a four-letter word.
And if you've not played any of them, you really should remedy that, because as far as I'm concerned, Expeditions is the single best original RPG series of recent years, and it's a great shame that we won't be getting any more of it, at least not from the same people.
