Expeditions: Rome Review
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Introduction
Expeditions: Rome is the latest entry in the Expeditions series of historical RPGs that started with Expeditions: Conquistador back in 2013 and was then followed by Expeditions: Viking in 2017. It also looks to be the last Expeditions game developed by Logic Artists, the series creators, as the team has now been disbanded, with the rights to the IP going to THQ Nordic, who may decide to do something with it in the future.
For now, though, we can take Rome out for a spin and decide whether or not it can be considered a worthy conclusion to the original trilogy.
When in Rome
If you're not familiar with the Expeditions series, it's fairly unique in that it combines historical settings with stories of adventure tailored to fit into an RPG where you lead a squad of conquistadors, a Viking raiding party, and now a Roman army, through some hostile and usually unexplored land.
In general, I loved Conquistador and liked Viking. Coincidentally, this mirrors my general feelings towards those two settings. But when it comes to Rome the country, I'm really not the biggest fan of it, and as a result, right from the start, I knew that a game set in and around those parts would have to live or die based on its own merits without any influence from anything even remotely resembling rose-tinted glasses.
And let me tell you, while initially, the game's insistence on interspersing its dialogues with Latin words was really grating, after a while, it kind of grew on me. In the end, I found Rome's story quite intriguing, its characters fun to be around, and its setting not that bad, actually. And now that I've beaten the game, I consider it to be my favorite Expeditions title to date.
Plus, even though you'll be playing as a Roman general, your journey of conquest and exploration will take you to all sorts of cool places. You'll fight rebellious pirates with Caesar, the man not the salad, conquer Egypt for Cleopatra, and be perpetually confused by the crazy Gauls and their even crazier druids. And between these three military campaigns, you'll be able to visit Rome as a citizen or maybe even a conqueror.
Taking place around the 1st century BC, the game starts with a couple of scheming brothers making a play for the Roman senate. To achieve their goals, they need to get rid of your father who can ruin their whole operation. This sets in action a chain of events where you get sent away to spend some time with an old family friend currently leading a military campaign against some Greek pirates, who aren't really pirates and more like rebels with a huge army, but that's politics for you.
When things predictably go wrong, through a combination of luck and nepotism, you're put in charge of a legion of your own, with the idea that a decorated general would have considerably more pull back home.
The plot only thickens from there. In fact, during the home stretch, it becomes so thick, you'll be hard-pressed to figure out what's going on, why certain characters act the way they do, and why, with the main villain constantly within your grasp, you can't just end him and tell everyone the Gauls did it, and instead have to invade Rome to finally get your revenge. But hey, at least once everything is said and done, you get an option to marry Cleopatra and retire as the king of Egypt in anticipation of being reincarnated as a cat. And how many games let you do something like that.
Now, seeing how my knowledge of Roman society mostly comes from Life of Brian and those old Asterix cartoons, I can't tell you just how historically accurate the game is. I mean the setting itself, not the cat reincarnation part. You do meet a bunch of historical figures. And some of the events are clearly inspired by things that actually happened. Still, I don't think the developers were very meticulous with their research here, seeing how on several occasions you refer to a decisive victory as decimating your foes, and even I know that this is a beginner-level mistake when it comes to the way Romans did things.
Do as the Romans Do
In practical terms, once the intro is over, you'll be left with a party of story companions and a legion of soldiers under your command. You'll be placed on an expansive overworld map separated into a number of regions where you initially own nothing, but will eventually own everything.
Wherever your legion goes, it's going to erect a camp that will act as your main base of operations. It will be your duty to upgrade this camp by using the resources your legion claims after conquering regions, and in return, you'll get access to various facilities you'll use to upgrade your gear, research new stratagems for your legion, heal your wounded soldiers, and hire new officers.
You'll need the latter to lead your soldiers into battle represented by this kind-of-sort-of card game, with the abovementioned stratagems acting as the cards you'll have at your disposal. You will also be able to equip and level up your officers and later use them as companions for the special pacification missions, or just in general. This will result in a party roster of around 20 characters, with regular encounters limiting your party to 6 members.
Now, if the above sounds more like a strategy game than an RPG, don't worry, this whole legion business mostly exists to provide your adventure with a sense of scale and an opportunity to navigate yourself into random encounters and events that will usually make your life harder in some way, but occasionally allow you to unlock some new perk for your character or discover a new crafting recipe.
In fact, this is one of my bigger gripes with the game. Back in Conquistador, you had to carefully manage your resources, and overall, it felt like you were exploring a wild and untamed land where at any point you were a reckless detour away from starvation.
Viking moved away from this system in favor of a Baldur's Gate-style overworld map where you just clicked on locations to go there. And now Rome sits somewhere in the middle where you have theoretically dwindling supplies, but it's all been simplified to the point where you would have to actively try to lose if for some reason you want to run out of resources or get defeated in a legion battle.
The real meat of the game then is you and your party following your army and personally dealing with various high-priority problems that range from bloody power struggles to some recreational tomb raiding. Those parts play as a more traditional RPG where you interact with NPCs, complete quests, and make oftentimes far-reaching choices. Most quests, even the optional ones, will have multiple, sometimes not obvious, solutions and mutually-exclusive rewards, suggesting a certain degree of replayability. Just going by some recent patch notes mentioning things I didn't even know were possible, there's way more branching in this game than what my single playthrough suggested.
It also helps that the game's writing is pretty good. It's atmospheric without being too wordy, the big overall story is intriguing and makes sense up until the final acts, side-quests tend to be fairly robust. It's good, basically.
Your story companions are both useful in combat and aren't excessively annoying, which is a fairly rare thing these days. They all come with their own personal stories that gradually unfold as the game progresses. And while you can regularly check back with them while making camp, they tend not to overburden you with their life stories all at once, and instead save their big story developments for when you return to Rome.
In fact, the bulk of the game's dialogues and companion interactions come in the form of these ambient conversations, Mass Effect-style. Basically, you'll be running around your camp or some town and you'll overhear various civilians, legionaries, or your companions gossiping or discussing some recent developments. Those conversations tend to be fairly amusing and provide the game with a lived-in feeling.
Which is a good thing, because outside of those, the game's locations tend to really lack interactivity. It seems like three games in, Logic Artists still haven't been able to figure out how to craft good social hubs, or what makes looting fun.
You see, Conquistador was one big map and most of the stuff you picked up were resources you really needed to survive. Viking then, with its new area-based structure, turned the game into a looting simulator by packing an ungodly number of boxes into each of its areas. Rome tries to fix this by replacing countless boxes with around 1-3 lootable objects per area, but it doesn't address the fact that at the end of the day, you're just scanning the map for highlighted objects and then waiting for your guys to get there, which can take a while, especially when ladders are involved. It's a waste of time that could just as easily have been replaced with a loot screen you got upon exiting an area.
On rare occasions, some box will be guarded and trying to loot it will lead to a battle. But those are the exceptions to the usual rule. The same can be said about NPCs. Outside of those ambient dialogues, you usually can only talk to a couple of NPCs per area, which makes those areas feel quite barren. And it's a great shame because they tend to look quite nice from an architectural and aesthetic standpoint. It would've been fun to actually explore them instead of just waiting while your characters jog between points of interest.
With this being the case, it's then a mystery why the game insists on throwing you into the thick of inaction so often, especially when it has a perfectly good overworld map to work with. Right now, in order to manage your camp, you need to click on it, sit through a, thankfully brief, loading screen, assign your new orders, resupply, pick up your new stratagems, then leave the camp and sit through another loading screen. You really should've been able to do all of this through some menu.
And, one final thing to mention here, just like in the previous Expeditions game, while overall this is a very much historical affair with no magic or monsters, there are some minor supernatural elements here. But they always leave plenty of room for a scientific interpretation if that's your thing.
Divide and Conquer
So, while the previous sections describe a pretty good game that could still use some work, now we're getting to the main reason why I enjoyed Rome as much as I did. The game's combat.
At its core, it's still a squad and turn-based affair with roots firmly planted in both Conquistador and Viking where during your turn you can move your characters in whichever order you see fit, but with the benefit of experience, Rome iterates on those ideas to create something truly spectacular.
First of all, very few battles simply task you with eliminating your enemies. Most of the time, you'll have some specific objective to win an encounter, like defeating an enemy leader, saving some hostages, burning enemy supplies, surviving an ambush, or even stealing some artifact.
These objectives result in very dynamic battles where you have to actually do things and utilize strategic thinking, as opposed to just hiding behind a piece of cover and waiting for the enemy to come to you. Paired with a great level design where maps tend to have multiple approach paths, varying levels of elevation, and numerous interactable items like destructible barricades and javelin stockpiles (that the AI doesn't hesitate to use against you), this creates some very enjoyable encounters.
And then, every once in a while, you get to participate in a siege that's like this grand set-piece battle where you'll be commanding your entire party, frequently joined by AI allies, in a multi-stage endurance battle where conserving health and resources is an added concern. You'll have to split your team into several squads, each with its own set of objectives, and once those are done, you'll usually get a chance to regroup and keep pressing your advantage in a battle with dozens of participants aided by some catapult fire.
Now, you might be wondering how such massive battles don't turn into an absolute slog. Rome solves this issue by giving us an animation speed slider that makes everything move at a brisk pace, but without turning the whole thing into some clown fiesta where character models are just zooming all over the place. It also makes it so the AI moves in batches whenever possible, and even you don't have to wait for your characters to finish moving before issuing new commands.
In recent years, I've been using Blackguards as the gold standard when assessing how good a game's encounter design is, and I have to say that Rome is definitely on that level. And while not an expansive RPG with countless side-quests, Rome does have plenty of interesting quests, some limited exploration, and the whole legion system, which all come together to offer a well-rounded experience that will take you in the vicinity of 50-60 hours to complete.
As a Roman, you'll have access to four classes of soldiers - a man with a shield, a scout, an archer, and a support/pikeman hybrid. And while most of the enemies you'll be facing will follow the same pattern, the later chapters will have you cross swords with shamans, berserkers, and other barbarian classes that shake things up. Though unless I missed something, unlike Conquistador, you won't be able to recruit any of those for your squad.
Each class will have access to three unique skill trees. These aren't particularly extensive, but still offer enough build variety to have at least two members of each class in your party specializing in completely different things. And while initially, some classes seem significantly stronger than others, after some skill point investment, both archers and scouts find their own niche and become absolute beasts if you use them right.
Apart from character skills, weapons in this game don't have auto attacks and instead come with a selection of active skills. As a result, you can have weapons with identical stats but different skills available to them, leaving a lot of room for experimentation when it comes to your loadout.
Now, the unfortunate part here is that you can't just say you want a sword with skills A, B, and C, and just get it. These are rolled randomly whenever you loot a weapon, or when you craft it. So if you really want a particular selection of skills, you'll need to craft a lot of swords.
As someone who doesn't like crafting in games, I wasn't particularly thrilled by this prospect, but at least the crafting system in this game is intuitive and not too annoying. And once you have the gear you like, you can keep upgrading it instead of crafting new stuff every few missions.
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.
