Recent reviews by Raggeman

A tremendous light strategy sandbox. Hopeful for continued development. The current state is well worth a purchase if the description speaks to you. As a strategy game enthousiast this goes right up there with the most interesting the genre has to offer.

Perhaps my biggest gripe is that the combat could be fleshed more. The bones are tremendous. The unit variety is interesting and I love the 'physics' of the whole thing; rockets, heavy cannons, fast firing turrets in a 3 dimensional battleground. There is a weight to every unit and it's fun to see all the interactions in battle. It just needs more units and worthy foes. Perhaps I've not reached the endgame difficulty though (if it's even intended to have that), I only ever got one of trees completed. Would love to fight an armada, have ship upgrades and the like. To actually be besieged. I only played the 'third difficulty(?)' but it was pretty easy.

Anyway I don't get passionate about games that often anymore but I'm really excited about it!

Endless modularity. Heats my home in the winter.

Defeat boring bullet sponges as you waddle around for as long as you can.

Terrible UI and drab randomly generated levels.

One of the most unique Total Wars. It's easier than most of the franchise and can be difficult to get to run properly.

It's absolutely dripping in historical context and the start dates properly reflect the course of history that followed. Once you get the fire-by-rank technology the fighting starts to moderately reflect warfare of the time. I wish the game had more nuance when it comes to tactical manouvres; historically jockeying for battle positions was much more prominent than this game reflects.

Treat it like a sandbox you can learn to abuse for fun and you'll have a good time.

The game giving proper homage to the decline of Roman military supremacy, while not discounting their continued prowess is truly respecting of history. While frustrating to deal with it's a very baked in bit of realism that I appreciate to no end as an amateur historian.

Like all Total War games it suffers from a focus on siege battles, but seemingly to a lesser extend than most of its successors. As a successor to Rome II it can actually give some decent insight into the development of warfare as time progressed to the early middle ages of Europe. Like Paradox, Creative Assembly suffers from under-investment in their games, owing to both the niche sectors and corporate ownership. I can only hope more developers enter the fray to end their genre monopolies, there's much to be improved.

Vast majority of the community is pretty friendly, although most people don't chat/talk. If as a beginner you have a question suddenly everyone is trying to help you, which is nice as some of the game mechanics and events aren't straightforward at first.

Gunplay is satisfying once you get around 15ish missions in and unlock some of the tech tree for a character. Joining up with randoms and immediately having everyone playing in sync and working together makes for a great time.

The game is supposedly optimized for lower resource PCs but the graphics don't give that away. Regardless the artstyle is implemented across the board. I haven't encountered any graphical glitches.

As for bugs, the only ones I've encountered are very minor and forgivable.

An excellent game all-round, should've picked it up a long time ago.

I purchased it based on the 'beta', the free game. Quickly regretted my purchase and whatever they turned it into.

Have had lots of fun with the game. Don't get the DLC at full price.

Truly fleshed out f2p game. It has a wide variety of weapons, abilities and levels. The maps are usually quite linear but can be hard to navigate at first.