Troy review: not that good

[Fenris]

I want to leave a review for this game but it doesn't look like epic games is the place to do it.

Basically downloaded it for free, so take this with a grain of salt, but it's a low budget TW game priced for a quality total war experience, and it's not that.

PROS:

So the Aegean makes for a lot of fun gameplay. In most previous TW titles you don't have too many big oceans forcing you to consider your options carefully. In Troy you have to be very careful not to move out before you're ready, because someobody will attack you and ruin your campaign unless you're absolutely sure you're safe at home and can afford to spend 3-5 turns sending your armies across the Aegean.

Duels are back! Your characters can have offical duels with a trait you can upgrade where they're locked into it, or they can have unofficial ones where a given character may just decide to leave if things not going well. It looks like the Devs spent a fair amount of time with all the possible character types because the duels are neat to watch and are one of the cleanest things about battles in this game.

Items are back: but it's a big step down from 3K. They're neat because they allow you to customize your characters, but are pretty forgettable having no real cosmetic change on your character and providing only minor buffs.

Fighting on walls is pretty clean, but units pass through each other every now and then.

New religious system that has potential to make gameplay fun, but right now it's just a hassle. It requires you to purchase a priest and spend food every turn to keep the favor up.

Crazy good optimization: you will have next to no problems running this game if you were able to get even a decent framerate on previous TW titles. Previous titles had me at 55+ fps on the campaign map and I was able to get as many as 150 in Troy on the campaign map. In battles with four armies the fps drops like you would expect, but even at 30 fps it was pretty clean and not all immersion breaking. no fps spikes/drops whatsoever.

CONS:

Inconsistent theme: Is it fiction or non-fiction? Make up your mind! You spend the entire game trying to get the favor of the gods, watching poseidon destroy your cities, playing with invincible characters who can't die, and then you hire some centaurs and they're just dudes with costumes. Cyclops Minotaurs, all just dudes with costumes.

Obnoxious rogue armies: In previous titles you had the problem where if you had a loaded front line of cities with armies the AI would send armies past you to sack your cities behind the front line. It was annoying but you could try to prevent it. In Troy this bs just gets to a whole new level. Most cities in this game are on the water and for that reason most can be sacked. You end up building the defensive building in every single one of your regions just to deny those small armies from sacking them, and even still, they get sacked A TON. This wouldn't be an issue, but the cost of armies increases exponentially with each new army, so you're limited to how many you can have. But the tiny AI factions can each support 1-2 armies and there are literally tons of factions. you end up in this scenario where you're in the end game, and you can't cross the Aegean even though your empire is fully upgraded and you have lots of beast armies, because the enemy keeps sending these kamikaze armies to sack your backline cities.

Trojan questline in bad state: Currently if you complete the first half of the trojan win condition, you confederate Troy and your brother's provinces, which as I mentioned forces you to have an outrageous army upkeep. you end up having to disband most of your confederated factions armies and then have to conquer the entire map with MAYBE 1 or 2 aggressive allies. But you have to defend all those territories that your brother just gave you, but you just disbanded his armies because the cost is so high. You see where this is going? More rogue armies coming to sack your cities and you can't afford to have enough armies to defend them all. This is where you feel helpless and like you're stuck on repeat. not fun.

The bugs. So many. bugs in diplomacy that won't allow you to cancel things like miltary access, bugs that let you demand thousands of free resources, bugs that will force you to load a previous save because you can't save or end your turn (happened to me after I sieged Troy for 2 hours and had to load a previous save), bugs that delete all the buffs from your upgraded character. I probably spent 10 hours on my Achilles campaign and near the end I was given a new piece of armor from the quest line that completely revoked all the HP buffs I had on him, which were massive 50%+ hp (that's a bug not an intended feature).

There are also a lot of strange decisions just in general. next to no cavalry in this game, a gold system that depletes over time, but that is unrecoverable if say a faction with 10k gold dies (it's just lost indefinitely), you can't trade multiple regions at any time, the religious system in the game is very expensive gold wise and requires the player to constantly use his agents to boost religious favor every turn.

And probably the biggest problem with the game, the combat is clunky and not fun to watch. Your soldiers swing, make no contact with anything, then a delay occurs, and a second later somebody near him falls down. Archers killing units makes the units pop up into the air like they stepped on an IED. Combat with generals is even worse, very slow and clunky. It's obvious they're trying to cater to the crowd that hated OP generals in 3K, but it's just cringe to watch. You can just tell theres a program trying to identify a target for the general to attack as it keeps rotating around unsure of what to do. Overall the generals are far weaker and will die to a unit, but they're just slow and clunky and it's not a clean experience. Units charging into eachother is cool to watch, and the way units form a circle around your heros when they start a duel in combat is fun too, but overall is just very clunky and not at all polished. You could download and play Rome 1 and you would see better unit interactions than what you can see in Troy. That speaks VOLUMES.



TL;DR: The game is fun, but if you're not a TW fanatic, wait for a sale. It's not worth $50 right now

[Hyena]

Yeah it's not even worth picking it up for free. I got it in the first 24 hours and regret the effort I went through.

[Dathek]

Pretty much how I feel

[👑Philip II Of Makedon👑]

I liked the idea, it had potential.

[deadbringer92]

same , tried it for 3 hours , bland , generic and boring to watch

[Doomier Guy]

It's rather meh. Back to Warhammer 2 for me.

[Jimbob]

I'm glad I'm not the only one with the Army issue. Who play-tested that?

[󠀡󠀡]

I enjoy the game for the most part, but battles are a huge turn off. Very basic and no cool kill/death animations.

[Fenris]

It would be a great game if it came out around rome2, or maybe before, but after the likes of warhammer and 3k it's just too far a setback IMO

[THEDOSSBOSS]

And that's not even scratching the surface in terms of issues

[Wraith]

I think it pretty great.
It has alot of potential good features that can be refined and put into warhammer 3.

The whole point of saga title to begin with.

[󠀡󠀡]

Originally posted by Wraith:

I think it pretty great.
It has alot of potential good features that can be refined and put into warhammer 3.

The whole point of saga title to begin with.

The resource system should be implemented in any upcoming total war game.

[Fenris]

Originally posted by Wraith:

I think it pretty great.
It has alot of potential good features that can be refined and put into warhammer 3.

The whole point of saga title to begin with.

yeah, but $50 cash is a lot of cash for a stepping stone to warhammer 3. It's like it made headway perhaps in certain areas but at some point you gotta just accept that they've made great total war games before Troy, and next to those Troy is just a massive downgrade, for $50 mind you

[Jimbob]

If you didn't get the chance to grab it when it was free then you should definitely wait for a sale. I don't think it'll be long before there is one.

[kiefer]

The food system is annoying. I’ve just hired a new general, it says he costs 300 food per turn yet my food income has gone from around 600 a turn to -150, and I haven’t even recruited an army for him yet!

[󠀡󠀡]

Originally posted by kiefer:

The food system is annoying. I’ve just hired a new general, it says he costs 300 food per turn yet my food income has gone from around 600 a turn to -150, and I haven’t even recruited an army for him yet!

There is something called diplomacy, you can sell other resources for food.