Rome total war gold edition review how to#

When in Rome, be an expansion pack for Rome.Ĭreative Assembly must be pleased with these six missions, as they're also the heart of the multiplayer game additions.

It's a challenge, and not a bad one at all. And you need to remind yourself, as well as being hard, the AI appears to have been particularly tweaked on each of these.

Rome total war gold edition review how to#

Even the initial one took me a few plays to manage to work out how to beat the dastardly Theban phalanx, effectively acting as a chance to remind myself how to best manipulate the more-realistic tactical approaches which are the mainstay of the Total War world. While the opening mission is relatively simple, with you merely in charge of few units in a larger mass-melee, it's clear that in terms of difficulty these are aimed at the Total War veteran. You think we love Shadow of the Colossus? We'd have to make an extension off the top of the mark scheme to contain our ardour if they'd had our Brian's voice booming some gobligook from the heavens. One of the few golden rules of videogames is that it's always better to have Brian Blessed doing a voice-over than not.

Between each you get an extended piece of narrative, with Brian Blessed on voice-overs. The six of Alexander's great victories (oh - all right, five of Alexander's and one of his old man Phillip when Alexander was just there) are played in sequence, requiring you to beat each one before progressing to the next. In fact, it's a little more like a traditional RTS-campaign. While it's arguable that, like its mother game, the map-based campaign-mode is the true heart of the game, the historical matches are of more import than we've seen typically. That it's about our favourite always-entertaining top-ancient greek bisexual conqueror's another bonus.Īlexander presents a trident of gaming additions - the extended campaign mode, historical battles and the extended multiplayer. Creative Assembly's Alexander is the most notable example of a strategy developer trying this, and while not up to Episode 1, it's in a position to snort at horsey-armour. There's a lot of that this year, isn't there? While most of the attention has circled around Valve (positively, for its excellent Episode 1) and Bethesda (less positively, for its less excellent give-horsey-some-armour), it's not just the first-person developers who are getting involved.