Expeditions: Rome (2022)

Starts of pretty strong with some good writing, interesting characters and obviously a great historic setting. Just being set in Rome is a point in my book, and here the devs really tried to make it as interesting as possible and a lot of effort was put into glossary, historical fun with the story and gameplay around it. Sadly in the end its not enough. It could have been if the game was shorter or some of the mechanics were less tedious and repetitive but eventually the game falls into a number of traps.

Big combats are extremly slow, the designs of those fights vary from very good, to straight up terrible, where you spend more time watching your enemies than moving your 4 guys (some of the siege missions are a mix of those, where one group has an interesting task, and another one is just a slog).

The strategic map mechanics are a total mistake. Its just chores, alongside the legion battles. At first I thought it might get interesting later on, but what they introduced at the tutorial level is all there is to it. Not fun or challenging, just taking some of the time.

The writing remained strong and in the end the story and characters were the only things keeping me interested, specially since the villain to your game character dynamic was nicely structured and not played out. But side characters could use some more dialog in the down time, rather than just having a small development between each acts. They do chime in during main stories, but that ends up not being enough.

In the end, the game could be far better if it wasn't stretched out and the non RPG stuff was made less obnoxious. Reminds me of Owlbear games where the RPG adventure parts are really nice, but everything around it is just annoying and slow and boring. Here its the same, but the combat is less interesting with some jarring designs for combats (specially fight with 50 enemies and incoming reinforcements, where you got access to useless catapults, but... cant use them on the fields the enemies are).

Great potential was buried here, but I guess I gotta wait a bit longer to my cRPG set in republic/imperium Rome. Age of Decadence was too tedious and clunky and this was too annoying and stretched out.

I only played the demo for this, so maybe there's more to it, but it seems like a perfectly adequate XCOM-like RPG with an ancient Rome veneer.

Like XCOM, you build a team of snipers, heavies, assaults, and support units and slowly level up their equipment and abilities through a series of tactical battles. Your main unit of each class is a named character here, with a boring personality and a Bioware-style loyalty system that sees them gain or lose approval points based on your actions. There's also a dull loot crafting system because crafting is trendy.

Unfortunately the tactical battles fall prey to the same pitfall that plagues XCOM 1 and many other tactical games, namely that running away from enemies and forcing them to waste movement coming to you is always the right decision. Most enemies have no ranged attacks, and overwatch shots from your snipers deal double damage for some reason, so trying any other tactic feels like even more of a waste of time than usual.

There's a strategy layer as well that I didn't spend much time with, where you put one of your units at the head of your army and pick from a few cards to decide how they'll advance. Victory felt arbitrary but seems like it probably comes down to a mix of resource management and a rock-paper-scissors battalion system where cavalry beats infantry beats siege weapons, etc.

It's okay, two stars.