If you were to live in ancient Rome, would you try to take power through emotional manipulation or brute force? Expeditions: Rome is the latest installment in the Expeditions franchise and follows the two previous releases Vikings, and Conquistadors, and talk about a glow-up! Developers Logic Arts have been hard at work preparing this Roman epic with the last installment being released in 2017. Following suit in gameplay with the last entries, Rome, in all her glory, is now imagined in a Turn-Based Tactical RPG. Published by THQ Nordic, Expeditions: Rome is out now for PC/Steam.

Right off the bat, I was thrown into a world of deception, plotting, and shadiness. Not even 5 minutes in and the game seemed to have more drama than Coronation Street. Starting as young Legatu, a high-ranking military officer whose father had recently passed suspiciously, your mother has shipped you out of the capital for “safety.” You, however, find yourself running and participating in many military expeditions and campaigns. You can create and customize your own character by picking height, gender, and physical features, however, there is a very minuscule set of options you can choose from.

If you were hoping to jump right in and make your character look like an anime protagonist, or even Ephialtes of Trachis, the deformed Hunchback from the movie 300, you will be disappointed. Only having a few options, however, made the startup feel more fluid and I didn’t spend an hour in the customization menu sculpting my statue of David. Well, realistically it would have looked more like a dropped mince and cheese pie, but you get the idea. There are 3 main dialogue paths you choose once you have created your character and they open up very specific dialogue choices, but you can learn another dialogue perk further down the track. These paths consist of Ethos, a path in which you use your power of authority to demand your way, Logos, a path in which you convince people using sound logic and reasoning, and Pathos, a path in which you use stirring rhetoric and emotional manipulation to gain what you seek.

Along with the three dialogue paths, there are 4 main classes you can choose from, including Archery(Ranged), Shielded Combat(Heavy), Spearman (Medium), and Swordsman (light). Each class has various perks and subclasses that can be appointed and unlocked with skill points from leveling up, and each has specific weapons and armors that affect their abilities, or more literally, change them entirely while in combat.

You lead your legion through the military campaigns thrust upon you, looting corpses along the way, ultimately making your name known. Leading 5 Praetorians has never been more fulfilling, tending to each one’s likeness, ensuring their morale doesn’t drop, and even making sure they survive, assuming you choose to allow combat deaths on startup. Each Praetorian has their own ideals and morals, and they will give you their opinion when needed, but you are the boss. You make the decisions and each action has an equal and opposite reaction. This is what I discovered during the second mission where we traveled off to be pyromaniacs and burn the pirates’ ships.

Venturing into the docks we could either go stealthy or loud and proud. I chose stealth to fully test the AI. Sure enough, even though some of my men hadn’t been spotted, the AI knew where everyone was at all times, so when I triggered a guard at one end, they swarmed my stealthy boys at the complete opposite end of the docks, even though they hadn’t been spotted or noticed. Besides this, the combat was super fun and tactical. Shields with 3HP took the brunt of any attack, and even if an opponent caused 8 damage they blocked it all, doing exactly what they were supposed to do.

Running a 3070TI, 32GB RAM, and an AMD 5800X, I thought this would be another game where I was able to run max everything without stressing too much hardware, however, at 1440P with ultra everything, I held a solid 75FPS without any major drops, with the exception of the FPS drops upon loading, and at 1080P, I struggled to get much higher than 110FPS averaging between 100-115. Now, I know most of you are thinking to yourselves that it’s not a fast-paced-shooty-boi, so anything over 60 isn’t needed, and you’re right in thinking this, but with my rig being relatively high end, I can only imagine how this would run on some budget builds. The developers recommend a Ryzen 5 3600x/ intel i5-9500, 16GB RAM and an AMD RX VEGA 56 8GB/ GTX 1070 8GB. With my specs far exceeding these, I would have expected to hold many more frames.

The graphics left a little to be desired. On ultra settings, it didn’t feel breathtaking, like some games of this Era do, however, the vibrant colors and the landscapes felt lively and non-repetitive like most RTS style games do. The loading screen artwork was amazing and the voice acting was next level, from the occasional banter between brothers at arms and them helping you strategize, or just the boys yelling for some traitorous bastard’s head, it never felt like there was any white noise. The background audio was flawless and had me lost within the world of ancient Rome for hours. The only major issue I ran into was that when I Alt-Tabbed out of the game and returned, my mouse randomly got stuck to a smaller resolution cursor box. When this happened, I was unable to select most things and the only fix was to restart the game.

To all the ancient world needs out there, I highly recommend picking up this title. With the mixture of game types from the turn-based Tactical Combat to the RPG aspects, and right through to the crafting/looting mechanics in the game, I quickly fell in love. Being able to choose my path of strategy and attempting to keep my Praetorians alive had me in suspense. I think this game is well worth the 70 dollars on release. I usually look at cost vs hours in the game, and I think this easily sits in the 1-1.5 dollars per hour, and I can see myself coming back for more!

Written by: Bigfoot