Rome Total War: Alexander will probably be one of the shortest reviews I’ve written on this fine repository for inane gaming takes. Solely because there really isn’t much here to discuss. If you’ve played Rome Total War, then this is basically the same game but considerably slimmed down. The first and most obvious reason for this is because we don’t have Rome, or indeed most of Europe in this version. Instead we have the Macedonians who mainly use Greek units. The Persians who use Eastern units and then a handful of weak barbarian civilizations. They use Barbarian units (as expected), but mostly only last for a few turns until they get destroyed. That’s about it, as far as the faction roster goes. You can play as the Indians, but they’re not in the campaign so… they’re only available for the multiplayer mode. As for the units themselves, while the faction roster is limited this expansion does feature around 25 new units. Mostly for the Macedonians. While some of them are fairly commonly used, a lot of them are still quite similar to existing units. Which meant that in my experience I was mainly Phalanx-maxing. To be fair to the game, the new units are nice. Even if most of them are very similar to existing units, you can already use as Greece. There are a few new cavalry units for example, but they function just like cavalry normally does. As for the rest of the rest of the new content, well… There is a new campaign, six new historical missions and that’s it. If you wanted to play as anyone other than the Greeks, then that’s not an option. At least outside of skirmishes and the multiplayer mode.

Which begs the obvious question “how’s the campaign then?”. Well it’s honestly pretty good if a little short. This is partly due the 100 turn limit, although I found I only needed two-thirds of that time to finish it. Basically you need to conquer a set list of provinces, while being at war with literally everyone else. The enemies are all allied with each other, but it will generally descend into you grinding down the Persians until they collapse. This is due to the rest of the factions being weaker barbarians. Who only have a province or two while the Persians control most of the map. As for the rest of the game, the battle AI is a bit better than in the base game so that’s nice. Although I do think it would’ve been interesting to get to play as… well anyone else. As it stands you’ll play through the campaign once, and that’s kind of it as far as the expansion goes. I mean sure there are those 6 historical battles. Plus the skirmish/multiplayer modes, but for me Rome Total War: Alexander feels a bit short. It took me around 10 hours to finish the Greek campaign, and then only a few more to get through the historical battles so it’s a short but sweet experience. The campaign itself doesn’t really have any particular twists, instead playing as a standard game albeit in a new map.

And honestly that’s about it! I’m really struggling to think of anything else that’s really worth mentioning. As I’ve said, there are some extra historical battles which is always nice and there is a new campaign that’s admittedly fairly short. There are some new units but they don’t feel that new. The sieges are the same. The AI has been improved slightly. Uhhh the game is still great like the base game and uhhh…. that’s about it. I guess I could gripe about the game being unstable on Windows 11. Or how the Steam Screenshot function barely works any more, but honestly who cares. This is a game that’s close to twenty years old at the time of writing, and it holds up well.

In conclusion then, Rome Total War: Alexander is an enjoyable if short piece of extra content. If you loved playing as the Greeks, you’ll love this expansion. Ultimately I’d recommend it to anyone who has played the base game. Although it won’t convince anyone who doesn’t already like Rome: Total War.

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Halo Wars 2 is quite a follow up act, as it has to compete with a game by the veritable but alas now defunct Ensemble Studios who made the first game. Fortunately Creative Assembly (CA) was up to the challenge, as they’ve managed to expand upon Halo Wars 1 while maintaining a high level of polish and some fun campaign mission design. For those who didn’t play the first game, Halo Wars was an attempt to bring RTS to consoles (specially the Xbox 360) which did away with most of the faff by streamlining base building, resources and unit types. That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of units, but every one is either an infantry unit, a vehicle, an air unit or a hero. There are very units in the game that are good against all of these unit types. As such most of the strategy is about building a balanced force and ordering units to fire against the enemy units they’re good against. So far, so standard. The twists that Halo Wars introduced were unit abilities, and commander abilities. The former are activated by hitting Y on the controller and range from grenades, to jet pack jumps through to cloaks and smoke screens. The latter are more substantial, basically functioning like the commander abilities in the later Command & Conquer games. By which I mean, you can spend money to call in a very powerful ability that can turn the tide of an engagement. These include calling in massive Area of Effect strikes that deal a lot of damage, healing all units in a radius for some time and deploying extra units or a temporary turret. The trick that CA have been able to pull off, admittedly by copying the work that Ensemble did, is to make all of these actions control well despite being performed on a controller.

To put this in more detail, just think for a second about how you hold your controller. You’ve got two thumb-sticks, two triggers, some face buttons and some bonus buttons above each trigger alongside a D-Pad. The A button selects units, you can double tap to select all units of the same type, hold it to select all units in a modest radius and hit the right button above the analogue to select all units on the screen. You move and attack with X, use abilities with Y, call in abilities by holding the left trigger and selecting an ability with the analogue stick and that’s about it. So if you want to attack the enemy you select all your units, advance them forwards the enemy, then begin selecting specific unit types and having them perform abilities and focus on certain targets. As a bonus all units can shoot while moving, but most struggle to hit enemies behind them. As for the humble D-Pad, it lets you instantly switch between a few camera targets – namely between your bases, your unit groups and any units under attack. If that’s not good enough then you can hold down the button above the left trigger to swoosh around the camera at speed. I don’t normally time discussing the control scheme of a game, but I think it’s worth doing with Halo Wars 2 because it really does feel quite seamless and it works well even in frantic moments. This is the main issue with RTS games on console, namely that they control badly. With this rubicon crossed, Halo Wars 2 then successfully manages to keep things fairly simple with regards to it’s economy and base building. Essentially there are some spots where you can build a full base, which grants you multiple connected building slots tied to that base. So you can’t build anywhere, and instead are funnelled towards fighting over these potential base locations. The game also does a good job in handling the relative scarcity of these building slots, because each building can only produce one thing at a time. So you can’t just spam units, because you don’t have enough buildings to do so – instead you basically are pushed towards having a balanced collection of forces. This is then compounded by the relativity tight unit cap (units cost between 2 to 9 population and you have an initial max of 80 which can be expanded up to 140). Why this matters is simple, basically you always need to juggle units and never feel like you can’t manage this task – leading to a game that lets you focus on the strategy. If you only have the ability to produce 8 buildings, and you need at least 1 of each resource structure (for the two resource types) then you have to weigh up the pros and cons of your base. You will probably want an infantry building, a vehicle building and an air production building. Maybe you don’t want one of these, but what it does is make base building intuitive and a series of snap judgements – thereby removing the urge to turtle and reducing the complexity for new comers. Of course you can just spam barracks and infantry rush your way to victory, but this is a risky strategy that won’t serve noobs well.

Speaking of turtling, you can only get 4 turrets per base and each turret has to be optimised. By default they’re good-ish against infantry and OK against air units. Each turret can then be upgraded to be optimised against air units, infantry units, vehicles or be turned into an artillery platform. That’s it. Oh and if the HQ is destroyed, then all of it’s connecting structures are instantly destroyed. So defending your base is a risky plan at the best of times, thereby further encouraging an offensive play style. Now some might be put off by this, but honestly it serves the game well to focus so heavily on offensive engagements because it thrusts the player away from the typical noob trap which is to overly focus on defensive play. It also gives the game more of a fast paced feel, which makes for an enjoyable campaign experience. Speaking of which, the campaign has a good tempo (outside of a slow first mission) that does a solid job of expanding on each unit in the UNSC arsenal. Initially it does feel a bit like a glorified tutorial, but it quickly casts this off with skill and introduces a series of enjoyable and largely different missions. There are a couple of defence focused missions, some based around skilful control of a small number of units, some that restrict the units you can build but not the quantity and others that just let you play a big battle against the enemy. Ultimately these missions are pretty well balanced and there are fleetingly rare instances where it feels unfair, while still offering some challenge. Especially for those who are willing and able to complete the optional side objectives, some of which can be quite challenging indeed. These campaign missions also feature some further optional bonuses in the former of “campaign logs” which are your typical lore nuggets masquerading as side content, alongside the return of skulls from the mainline Halo games. These skulls can be activated on playthroughs of campaign missions (after they’ve beaten normally for the first time) and activate some bonuses, drawbacks or double-edged swords for the player. Some examples include +50% HP for player units, basic infantry explode on death to damage nearby enemy units and all player units take gradual damage over time. To unlock these skulls, you need to complete some of the side objectives in each mission.

And even if you don’t care about the unlocks, you’ll have to concede that Halo Wars 2 is a high quality game. Not only does the gameplay function well, with simple concepts and great controls allowing a range of depth almost equivalent to a great PC RTS game but everything surrounding the game is handled well. First and foremost the graphics are great, I played on my humble Xbone and even paired with a cheap older TV in my office everything looked good. There’s a nice range of colours, explosions pop, everything is readily readable at a glance and in game everything is handled well. Then there are multiple cinematic cutscenes, which also look great and manage to convey the plot well. Unlike some other games (cough Destiny cough) the plot is pretty straight forward and you don’t need to be an expert on the lore to keep track of what’s going on, sure the writing doesn’t have the campy charm of say Red Alert 2 but everything is good enough. The soundtrack is decent, nothing amazing but dynamically adjusts with the amount of action on screen and fits the soundscape of the Halo series. Finally the two factions themselves are similar but different enough that they’re both fun to play, without one necessarily being more overpowered than the other. It’s therefore a game where I can’t think of any significant flaws, sure some of the finisher moves that occur in combat with hero units can feel a touch cheesy but that’s not a real issue. The commander call-ins can be annoying when they’re used on you, but again you also get to call them in on the other player so it’s not a huge deal – especially as they’re quite expensive (especially in the early game) and have relatively long cooldowns. Halo Wars 2 is just one of those games that had a clear vision and delivers it without any issue, enabling casual players to have a bit of fun while loading enough content into the game for players who want a more meaty challenge.

Speaking of content, aside from the campaign which has a modest 12 missions that can be played in co-op (expandable with two DLC purchases that give you more) you’ve also got two other game modes. The first and most obvious is the skirmish mode, which can be played against bots or people or a mix of both. This mode has 3 rule-sets available within it. There’s the standard “destroy the enemy’s base” (deathmatch) mode, a control points mode (domination) where you and your opponent are both competing to hold 3 control points on the map and finally a “strongholds” mode. This one is basically a twist on deathmatch, as both players are competing to control as many bases as possible and have unlimited resources. Each skirmish match can be played with up to 6 players in total, split between a maximum of two teams. Alongside the skirmish and campaign modes is a “Blitz” mode, which is essentially a tweaked version of the domination mode above. There are a couple of gimmicks, with the central one being that each player has a deck of virtual cards that allow them to call in units and commander abilities. This is necessary as there are no bases, nor any way to purchase units or buildings normally. Instead you have a total of 4 cards in your “hand” at a time and can use one of these to deploy the corresponding unit or ability to anywhere that you have vision. Additionally this mode only has one resource called energy, which pays for all cards. You have a modest income stream throughout each match, but the main way to gather more resources is to attack “energy cores” which drop in randomly across the map. To make things more complicated, cards can have attributes – for example a unit might explode on death to deal damage or steal life from enemies while attacking them. This is then compounded by the fact that some cards are specific to certain commanders, so you can’t use the “Mac blast” (basically a big ass cannon blast) with any UNSC commander other than Isabel. Not only does this help make things slightly less convoluted for newcomers (as it means you can roughly expect what sort of BS will be deployed by each commander) but it serves to help the game’s monetisation. Which is obviously the main concern of the players. Basically you want good cards, because they’re more powerful and if you get duplicates of a card, then that card levels up and becomes more powerful. Now you do get a decent amount of cards just by playing the game, in my case I got around 24 card packs by beating all of the campaign missions, getting a few level ups (from the campaign mission XP) and playing the game across a few days (one pack per day). With that being said, I can imagine someone who really wanted to win might be tempted to buy a batch of say… 23 card packs for just under 15 pounds (apparently the most bundle at the time I checked). Again for context, both of the DLC packs combined cost as much as this “most popular” card bundle.

In spite of this somewhat questionable microneutralisation strategy, I do have to admit that the Blitz mode is cool and manages to be fast paced and even more streamlined than the base game. The control points are captured instantly, you can summon units from your hand anywhere (although they have -50% HP and damage for 8 seconds if deployed outside your base) and it’s just a quicker way to play the game. Which is a good thing, because a match that can last 12 minutes max is more appealing than say a MOBA match that can last anywhere from 30 to 180 minutes depending on how bogged down everything gets. One last mode I haven’t mentioned is the Firefight mode, because you need to own the DLCs, and I don’t. This makes it exceedingly hard to review, as I’m sure you can imagine.

In conclusion then, Halo Wars 2 is a pretty fun console RTS game with high production value and one case of questionable micro-transactions. The campaign is fun and does a good job of introducing the UNSC arsenal while having decent mission variety, even if it’s fairly short. As for the other modes, skirmish is solid even there aren’t that many rulesets on offer, while the Blitz mode is an even more streamlined version of the game. It’s just an all-round well made game and one that I can easily recommend to RTS fans and even those who are bad at RTS games but are looking for a good entry point.

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Today I’m taking a look at an enhanced re-release of 2004’s classic release, Rome: Total War. For full disclosure, I was a massive fan of the original release of Rome Total War and still have my physical on-disc copies of this game – which turns out to have been a prudent move as you can now no longer buy the digital versions of the original game! Instead you MUST buy the Remaster, which is currently selling for £24.99 / $29.99 / 29,99€. The only respite for purists is that when you buy the remastered version, you also receive the original digital versions – but are they even required now that the shiny new remaster is out?

To it’s credit, the remaster does a decent job of updating the visuals to modern standards (although the unit fidelity is still behind more modern releases obviously) and more importantly comes with a range of resolution options that are more pliable for modern systems. You can now utilise ultra-widescreen and UHD resolutions, in addition to taking advantage of your 4K display by enabling more modern 4K textures (FreeLC activation required for them though, as they bloat the game size significantly!) The changes are honestly fairly subtle, but between these upgrades and the new resizeable UI the game is definitely more pleasant to run on systems with high end resolutions – in addition to being more “future proof”.

This wasn’t just a standard visual upgrade however, as the developers (Feral Interactive) decided to tweak some aspects of the gameplay, which has been a mixed bag in my humble opinion. On the one hand, it is nice to see that they attempted to make some modest tweaks to the formula without sacrificing any of the feeling (and indeed, limitations) of the old game. Naval battles are still decided via auto-resolve, the occasional rebel army/fleet still seemingly appears out of nowhere (so take care when repositioning a single unit or even small army on the campaign map) and diplomacy is still handed via physically sending diplomats around the map.

The major changes are that you can now access all factions from the start of the game (via an option hidden under advanced settings), you can now access an additional 16 factions which were previously only accessible via mods and you have an additional agent type – the Merchant. Honestly I found these new agents to be a waste of space, as the AI (and even rebels) spawn them en masse and all they do is clutter up the map while producing relatively little gold. While doing a bit of testing I found that my high level merchant added an astonishing 100 gold per turn, which is about the upkeep cost of the absolute lowest infantry unit you can keep as a garrison. With such a low rate of income, I found that the best use for my merchants was taking out other merchants belonging to enemy factions – but I found that these enemy merchants could be safely ignored as they can’t really do anything to you. Considering that you can spawn 1 merchant per city and that most cities will need at least a few filler units acting as a garrison (otherwise you’ll suffer public order penalties which can lead a city to rebel) they don’t seem particularly important, but at least the option is there I suppose.

The major caveat to these pleasant changes, which range from worthwhile to forgettable, is that the remaster now has two problems which are worse than the original Rome Total War experience. Firstly, you will experience more crashes to desktop (CtDs), although to Feral Interactive’s credit they have produced a few patches which have made the CtDs less present. With that being said, even four or five months after release I had one every 10 hours or so. Not a massive issue in the grand scheme of things, but as the game only autosaves on turn start and turn end and as each battle can take anywhere from 5 to 60 minutes, it’s entirely possible to lose an hour of two’s worth of progress if the crash happens at an inopportune time (e.g. during a turn in which you have had 4 battles and decided how to spend a stack of cash on your settlements).

Those thinking you can just skip those pesky battles will be forgiven for remembering that the game has an auto-resolve feature, however it is very, very random except in clear-cut cases. If you have a 95% win chance during a siege then it’s a no-brainer, but for any semi-balanced engagement you run the risk of getting absolutely slaughtered by an AI force that is outnumbered and outclassed. The auto-resolve is also extremely loathe to let enemy generals die, to the point that a single general can and will engage an entire army to… lose half his health and then retreat out of combat range. After he already retreated, so your army has wasted a turn chasing him around the map for no result. It is truly a cat and mouse game for those who are reluctant to load up a manual battle (Achievement hunters beware, the “auto resolve every battle in a campaign” achievement is going to be a colossal pain in the arse).

The other major issue with this remaster, is that it has made the path-finding and formations even worse. Now to be fair, it wasn’t perfect in Rome Total War either but it is now noticeably more sluggish. For the Greek civilizations this is especially galling, as they depend heavily on the Phalanx formation which is now extremely temperamental due to the need for seemingly every man in a unit to be in the right spot before they actually form the formation you need. Units now also flail around like morons for longer when you try to re-position them during battle, which is a double-edged sword that can lead to you or the enemy getting plenty of free hits in. These issues come to a head in the sieges, which feature tight spaces (which make formations a pain at the best of times) and plenty of bitter close combat back-and-forth fighting. Getting your troops to face the enemy, without letting themselves get flanked, while all this extra fannying about is going on can be simultaneously challenging and irritating.

Roman players (which are the recommended choices for beginners) are also hindered by these changes, as their frontline units have a very powerful free missile attack that can decisively change how a one-on-one fight pans out. Due to the aforementioned issues however, they now need more time to get ready as legate Hugh Janus holds up the whole cohort’s re-positioning due to getting stuck on a pebble. As this powerful missile attack has a very, very short range it is depressingly common for the formation fumbling to result in your Triarii charging an enemy, abruptly stopping to stand still while every, last, soldier finally gets their javelin out, then failing to use their javelins as they get counter charged by those loathsome Gauls. Fortunately you can disable missile attacks for them when they are selected, but considering how powerful these missiles are it is a shame to forego them.

Some of the other changes aren’t a downgrade per say, but they are somewhat underwhelming. The new loading screens are bland and repetitive for example (and you will be seeing them a LOT unless you are going for the aforementioned auto-resolve every battle achievement), while the in-game Wiki is extremely basic to the point that I had to read old forums to gleam information as it is just a glorified webpage that loads in the Steam Overlay browser. To access the expansion packs you need to mess around with the mandatory Creative Assembly launcher which boots before of the game, which isn’t really an issue but does add a bit of delay between starting the game and actually getting to play the game. For context the original version on Steam just had a pop-up when you hit launch, asking which one you wanted – now you need to wait for the launcher app to start, then hit a section within it, then select play to access the new expansions.

But at this point I’m nitpicking and to be fair, there are also some small minor changes which are helpful. The map camera controls are improved which is nice, but more importantly the tactical interface during battles from latter games has been added, enabling you to see more of the battle details at a glance (and make those pesky sight blocking trees get out of the way). There are also a few more tweaks on the campaign map regarding visual overlays and “heat maps”, but I barely used these – however it again serves the purpose of letting you see more information at a glance if you are so inclined.

At this point I’ve almost entirely been comparing the remaster to the base game, so if you haven’t played the base game and have stuck with me thus far then I can tell you that it’s still a great TBS/RTS hybrid. You train units, capture settlements, move armies and agents around on the turn-based map then switch to a smaller map for RTS battles (which are generated based on the local world terrain that the armies are clashing in) when your forces actually engage with the enemy. Each faction has been crafted with a fair amount of historical accuracy in mind, which leads to them having decently divergent rosters and thus leads to the armies having their own play-style and plenty of unique units. This extends to the settlements as well, with only certain factions having the ability to construct high-end fortifications and sanitation systems (which are near essential as cities gain “Squalor” as they grow, which makes them increasingly difficult to keep happy and thus non-rebellious). As such the factions are asymmetric if not entirely balanced, which makes the long campaign quite fun as your tactics and army compositions will need tweaking from foe to foe. Plus it makes the game more replayable, as each campaign will play out at a different pace depending on how good your end-game units are – the Barbarians are generally advised to go as quickly as possible for instance.

For new-comers I would highly recommend one of the Roman factions, alongside a warning to move QUICKLY as you WILL be required to face your erstwhile Roman comrades in a civil war scenario in the closing stages of the game. If you take your time, your fellow Romans will quickly sweep through the map and thus become quite challenging when you eventually have to slap them down. Similarly if you are desperate to play as, say, the Gauls or the Greeks then you had better move quick as the Roman factions function as a group in most diplomatic matters and therefore declaring war on one means fighting them all.

With my closing verdict, I would say that Rome Total War: Remastered is a worthwhile purchase for newcomers to the series and frankly does a better job of making you feel like an Emperor in waiting than it’s sequel. It has plenty of content due to the inclusion of the expansion packs and has a lot of re-playability and length due to the variance between the factions. For veterans of the series, this is a good if occasionally mixed remaster with a handful of pleasant Quality of Life features and some newly playable factions but otherwise not much in the way of substantial changes. If you already have the originals (like me) then it’s entirely optional of course, but I would still pick it up on a sale if only to give yourself an excuse to sink another 30 to 40 hours into a campaign.

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