Recent reviews by ShadowSun

Despite all the improvements I do not think Imperator Rome is a game worth playing.

It's got the prettiest map in a paradox game and finally pops are back in a meaningful way, but too much of EU4 infests this game. Every war is a giant ww1 style alliance bloc of one side vs all their mini little city states with tiny armies that have to be hunted down as they buzz around like flies. The AI is still terrible and over prioritizes attacking you even when it's supposed to be defending so it's easy to just bait it into bad battles and wipe out tiny allied units because they never form together into a threat. There's aggressive expansion which is just an arbitrary cap on blobbing, and blobbing is all you're going to be doing because there's really no other way to play the game.

There's tons of things the game could do better but what it is missing is a simple reason to play. There is little narrative to make here, or any other way to make your mark on the world other than 'my empire got bigger after winning this war' or 'I beat Rome by spamming mercenaries and winning battles until they ran out of manpower' There's no interesting stories of betrayal or defiant resistance against a foreign enemy or a mercantile city state influencing countries from the shadows. Every nation still plays the exact same, with each country basically being a bigger or smaller Rome, that has to expand and get stronger the same way Rome did. You can either play as Rome, or play as a non Rome tag that basically recreates the Roman expansion except they beat Rome to the punch instead. That's about the only narrative that can ever play out in this game. You can also sit in a city state and watch the AI expand to, if you would like.

It more than any other game I would love for PDX to return to and try to bring the game out. 2.0 showed some potential, but since it appears it will never be utilized, it is going to remain wasted potential.

Not a very good game.

I really like the art style and music is great, but the mechanics of the game themselves are nothing special and very barebones and hampered by an over reliance on random number generation.

To summarize, the game is all about stats. Armor stats, weapon stats. This isn't anything new, but the game relies on RNG for nearly every aspect of its design. To put this in perspective, nearly everything is dictated by die rolls. How good your bros are at fighting, moving, health is all determined by random chance. This results in a lot of rerolling. Hiring bros, seeing he has a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ trait or a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ line of abilities and trying out a different one. There's not really any stories or connections to be made here. Maybe there's a bro who has good stats you like, and then one you want to get rid of cuz his stats are ♥♥♥♥♥♥. There's only four or five playable builds in the game and if your characters aren't centered around them they will underperform and get killed easily. The 'meta' is all there is to this game, you either learn it or suffer needlessly or just ♥♥♥♥ around for fun.

I personally do not enjoy gamble to hit games, and this game feels pretty lackluster as a result. With zero consistency on performing damage, DPS and archers are really not encouraged due to randomness of dealing damage as 50 percent of your shots will likely miss and do nothing. This makes the game revolve around armor instead. Since you won't be doing a lot of hitting, but you can survive a lot of hits yourself. A lot of battles feel slow and grindy as a result of this and sometimes I glaze my eyes over and just spam the attack button until one dude falls down in the bigger battles. This game isn't about being offensive. It's about finding a good spot to turtle up in big armor and just wear down your opponents.

The map generation, contracts, monster mobs are all entirely randomized. This ensures no experience is the same in theory, but often all my experiences were either this game is way too easy or you're hit with an impossible battle and mogged to death. Due to combat being the only thing you actually do in this game, you will eventually run into a randomly generated battle that overwhelms you in stats and completely destroys your party. This is intended, and this is where the 'fun' is. Rebuilding yourself up from nothing. If you are really into that limited and one dimensional experience, then this is the game for you. It's entirely arbitrary and your experience will either be slogging through early games over and over or snowballing your way at the top because you only progress one linear way. You as a player don't learn or develop anything, your armor and weapons are just better and that's it.

There's not really any getting good at the game. You don't get better at the game or learn better tactics. Rushing to the hill is always the default, and hunkering down as waves of enemies come at you. The game is a giant stat check, smothered over with RNG formulation to make everything extra chaotic and stupid. There's not really a plan or strategy and frankly the game is more akin to being a good accountant than playing chess with gaming the very simplistic in game economy to get max resources for least cost.

Ultimately this game is very mediocre and overhyped. There's not much to do once you're at the top other than fight the end game crisis which is just more mobs that have end game gear. You fight battles to get better at fighting battles and get your numbers up. There's not really any depth here, and the randomly generated world gets old fast once you start seeing the same events and mobs appear over and over again. I'd compare it to Minecraft where you just keep digging into the ground just to get more resources to dig better with. It tickles that monkey brain part of you that gets excited a number is getting bigger and not much else.

This is an amazingly put together shooter. Challenging enemies that feel like a fun throwback to old school FPS enemies but revamped for modern play. Fast paced level design that is nicely designed with slow bits of exploring and set pieces combined with big arena set piece battles. The graphics are charming, and can get surprisingly well done at points in the game. If you don't like the muddy and pixelated aesthetics, there's lots of moddable settings in the game to spruce it up to your choice.

Short campaign but tons of replay value and difficulty modifiers to crank up the challenge. Music that has no right to be as good as it does, and really sells the atmosphere.

Overall this is a step above the usual throwback shooters. This has the great weapons, level design and variety to put it up to the older FPS classics.

The biggest issue for me is this runs terribly on my gaming laptop that can run Three Kingdoms and WH2 at 60 fps with only issues in intense battles. There is constant stuttering lag and FPS drops if just two units are fighting each other, let alone whole armies. This runs worse than the original, which is notoriously difficult to run well on modern hardware. The entire point of the remaster is that it'd run smoothly on new hardware, and it's completely failed in that purpose.

The UI is not as big of an issue as people are making it out to be, but it's still questionable decision why to change it at all. It certainly looks a lot worse visually, much more cluttered and showing you too much information all at once that would easily overwhelm people unfamiliar with RTW. Although I've found once you get the hang of it, it can work a bit better than the original UI.

Also the unit pathfinding feels very off. Units will break formation almost immediately, and usually go from a firm battle line to a disorganized mob when you tell them to attack nearby units. Units will often get stuck on things and go around in circles sometimes, having to be re given orders several times just to fix themselves. It just feels ALMOST like the original, but not quite.

Other issues are just typical multiplayer issues and the multiplayer desyncs and connection issues that all these games suffer from. Overall I think there is potential here but this is a very poor showing for a game release from what I've experienced.

This is a tough game to review.

Warhammer 2 is very similar to Warhammer 1, to the point they're almost the same game. WH2 is a glorified expansion pack that is 60 dollars, and still requires the presence of WH1 to run the Mortal Empires map, the big combined map of both Warhammer games that was a big draw of 2's appeal.

But to start more with some pros, let's go through them.

The game is very visually pretty, maps look amazing, unit models are superb across the board. Projectiles and some magic spells do look poor, but overall the set dressing of the game is superbly designed. A great art team worked on this game and it shows.

You get to have all the warhammer manchild toys at your disposal, and lots of attention to detail for the nerds who like the lore and all sorts of heroes/units and battles that you get the chance to experience all in real time. If you're a big WH nerd, this is an easy recommend.

However, that's about all I can say for pros.

The gameplay is a mixed bag here. The building and development is very very streamlined, with pretty much one building chain for every major need. Missile troops, melee troops, cav, income and public order, and then maybe some agent buildings. There's no real developing beyond just improving the population overtime. It's a lot better than Rome 2's cluster♥♥♥♥ system, but mostly since it cult all of the fat. There's nothing terrible, but nothing exciting. It gets the job done.

Battles are very...off. The WH mechanics being ripped from the game board and into Total War seem natural at first, but reveal a lot of quirks. First off, battles are just a lot more messy. Units rout, come back, and rout again nearly all the time, causing frontlines that resemble postmodern art than any sort of battlefield. Unit stats are the king here, and there are very few ways for inferior units to get the best over higher tier units. For example, in previous total wars it was possible to delay elite units with your trash ones to buy time for your own elites to make a flank. In this game, morale shock tactics don't work for very long, and eventually your trash units will just get grounded down by the enemy's better melee.

Melee in general is very underpowered. Melee infantry in particular. They perform almost poorly in every situation, especially on higher difficulties. To the point where the strategy for most higher level players seems to be relying entirely on archers/artillery/ and spells to actually deal damage while using melee heroes and infantry as basically big walls to stop enemy movements. Melee infantry will take too much damage, are slower, and don't deal enough damage compared to their archer counterparts. This makes infantry focused factions like Chaos a real pain to play, and result in my opinion a very stale and boring style of gameplay mostly centered around getting your ranged units in a good position to camp as the enemy army zergs to you with no real tactics or strategy at play.

At the end of the day, there is not much strategy fun to be had here. The magic spells and heroes have always felt a bit odd in total war. Generals are now mostly routed not by their own condition, but by the condition of the army. This makes general sniping an impossibility, especially against Legendary Lords. So this means you're going to be fighting, messy slog fights against units who do not rout, where tactics and strategy mostly disappear and it comes down to who just has the higher number or who has the most OP spell to play. There are no longer any clean decesive victories unless your lord just completely outclasses the enemy lord. Seeing your units chase a fleeing hero off the battlefield, poking at him with their weapons as this high health lord just refuses to die and routs away is really just, weird and feels wrong. It goes against the logic of the earlier titles and actual battle strategy in general. To summarize, in previous titles you killed the general to rout the army. In Wh2, you kill the army to rout the general.

Speaking on spells, they turn this game into an odd mix of Dota and Total War. Fun on paper maybe, but this game it's the worst of both worlds. Heroes overall just aren't very good enough to make an impact on their own, with some big exceptions such as the elf legendary lords. Their spells also tend to be very disruptive to the gameplay, and a well planned attack could immediately be destroyed by some wizard casting a firestorm into your line. Magic can't exactly be countered, just have it's effects mitigated mostly. It confounds the already confusing strategy of the game even more. Faction diversity is nice, but is often one note. If you are Bretonnia, you use cavalry. End of story. If you are light elves, you are using archers. Playing outside of these boundaries is possible, but often just not worth it. It is not as impressive as Rome 1 or even 2's faction diversity. That had steppe hordes, phalana formations, barbarian hordes, and roman legions that all required different tactics to play, and had different methods of play as options. WH2's factions are much more inconsistent, and heavily rely on outside DLC purchases to become playable. The Skaven are fun, but require two dlcs to be worthwhile. The Orcs require DLC as well to become more fleshed out. The factions in base WH2 are fine, but mostly because one is a copy of the other, Light Elves to Dark Elves, and the other is a copy of WH1 faction, the vampire pirates. Which also need DLC to be interesting. The issue of WH1 being separate is also a problem, since some faction campaigns are fun with wh2 dlc, but with wh1's map. Why not just sell a Mortal Empires DLC so you don't need to get the base game? Because ♥♥♥♥ you you need to pay 30 dollars for a game you won't even install.

Overall, the gameplay in the battles is messy, counter intuitive and often the AI cheats on a disgustingly blatant level. Spawning armies directly on your path. Experience buffed to fresh units who never saw combat. Tons of money boosts so they'll always have more armies than you. The ai are just cheaters, and having it be so obvious and in your face is immersion shattering to say the least. It makes losing to them feel unfun and arbitrary, rather than a reflection of mistakes you as player made.

In my personal experience, the early game build up is fun but the campaigns really lose their steam around the turn 40 mark. There's usually nothing to defend anymore as you've dealt with the intial threats, and nothing to do but paint the map against the hapless AI who cheat to stay relevant in your snowballing power. The end game chaos threat is a joke, and CA has acknowledged this for years but no updates ever on fixing it. Maybe when you buy the 60 dollar Warhammer 3 you'll finally get a finished faction. Maybe.

If you want to mess around with your manchild toys in the Games Workshop sweatshop that is CA's Warhammer games now, go ahead. But if you want a serious strategy experience, I would suggest other strategy games.


I would never say this is a bad game. But, it is a very shallow one. Once you have your fun messing with the big dinos or having a spell wipe an army, there is little more to appreciate for this game. Pretty to look at it, but ultimately vapid.

For all the good parts in this game, the sum of the whole is bad.

The region system has never been great. Regions are public order balancing acts, with each settlement having to follow a strict rule of cultural buildings to avoid the public order breaking income buildings. It is a very strict, and intrusive way of buildings compared with the much more freeform Medieval or Shogun 2 that allowed you to build whatever you wanted as long as you had the cash and checked squalor or food supplies. You are constantly having to micromanage PO and food, and tearing down expensive buildings just to calm your crazy population down with cultural buildings. Not to mention the random events that just get everyone upset for no reason. No building just gives a single benefit, they all have to take away something that you have to manage. It's just a chore, at the end of the day.

Rome 2 is a lot more obtuse and overcomplicated, and this takes away from the sandbox element of the game. It's very arbitrary and gamey, food buildings generate squalor just because, so that way you are penalized for just building them and have to build something to counter it. It's just tedium, and distracts from the battles. Most tellingly, despite the building system being more annoying than ever, military buildings (the only thing you'll need) are simpler than ever before.

Armies stuck to generals is just not good. It's never been good. It limits what you can do with your units and makes organizing your armies a chore. No idea why CA did it and stuck by it. It makes the game very stack heavy as well, combined with the very large movement speed armies have.

Settlements are useless and easily taken in terms of siege. Unless it has a wall (most don't) you have a good chance of losing it. This combined with the increased mobility of armies makes it very easy for a single AI army to stomp through a hole in your defenses, capturing settlement after settlement. The AI is frustrating and doesn't like to stand and fight, and will often just flee and abandon settlements to go and try and find a new one. It's really immersion shattering to say the least.

The trait system, like the building system, is overcomplicated and is more tedious than interesting. There are three traits, three trait trees. Just do the speed buffs in cunning, all the other ones are way too inconsistent. Speaking of which it's very easy to get over buffed armies with a passive list of traits that takes up the whole tooltip. Very annoying for all of these gamey obtrusive number stats that can swing the course of a battle. Takes away from the tactics and strategy just because your general has X amount in whatever.

Oh yeah, the battles! The battles in the total war game! They feel okay. There is a lot of missing polish, and very weak music. Skirmishers have been improved a lot, which is good and they still mostly retain the total war classic gameplay. Unfortunately the obnoxious campaign mechanics really get in the way of just having a good battle.

What about mods? Mods usually end up compounding on all of the annoying campaign mechanics, and adding even more. Divide et Impera adds population mechanics, localized recruitment, makes everything hurt your public order just....yawn. Not relevant to what total war is about. the real time tactical battles. It's also limited with the campaign system, so mods can't really fix this game.

The politics system is simply nonsense. Your actions make little to no sense on how they influence your balance of power, and factions are flat out annoying, especially the ones that don't like you being at war in the total war game. You can get a civil war popped on you on a die roll, and despite reading countless guides and interacting with the damn thing i have little to no idea how it works other than just giving the faction that hates you money. Like a lot of things in this game, it's obtrusive, distracting, and frustrating. Find a mod to turn this off is my recommendation.

Overall, Rome 2 does one thing right, two things wrong usually. It's a very mixed bag, and a far cry from the simple fun of it's predecessors. It isn't a bad game, but it's not really a great or good one either.

The vanilla game is a fun experience, but it has aged quite a bit as Total War titles have progressed throughout the years. Diplomacy is quite lacking, the graphics though still good are showing their age, and finally many of the factions have samey or similar unit rosters with only one or two different units in the roster.

So why play this over modern total war games?

There's a few answers to that. One is just pure polish. This game is very well made, and the combat and battles feel weighty and violent. This is helped too by the fantastic soundtrack the game has. The battle lines ebb and flow as the fight progresses, and cavalry charges on flanks can absolutely decimate guys unlucky enough to be in their path. It's very visceral and fun, and with the clanking of metal swords and shields and the screaming of men, the sound design is stellar.

The game is also very easy to pick up and play, there isn't a very steep learning curve. Once you've played a campaign on Medium and gotten used to a faction you like, the rest of the game is smooth sailing learning curve wise. That isn't to say it isn't without challenge on the harder difficulties, but nothing you face will be campaign threatening. Even the worst defeats can still be recovered from in most cases.

City management is also probably the best in the series. You are limited in what units you can recruit, so you can't just pull the best knights all together in one doomstack. You have a select few elite knight units, with peasants and militia filling out most of the ranks. This makes what you build in towns very important, and there are lot rpg mechanics for building up castles to be elite knight factories, or making cities wealthier than Constantinople. It's not very complex, but enough there to make you be careful with your knights in case you lose them in a lousy charge and careful with what you build.

All in all, the game is old. But what it does, it does very very well. I won't say it's absolutely superior to newer total wars, but this game has special qualities that I feel the more recent titles lack. Such as a good soundtrack, excellent sound design and a wide range of factions, units, and buildings to explore. Not to mention the wealth of mods that are out there for this game, including big hits such as Total War: Third Age and Stainless Steel, which makes up most of my playtime. Sadly newer total war titles seem to completely disregard modding, when it's helped this game stay relevant for a decade.

If you're a fan of any Total War games, it's a must have and you can't go wrong with buying it. If you're new to the series, it's a pretty forgiving starting place and sink your teeth in. All in all I can't really recommend it enough, and it's my personal favorite in the series.

Age of Empires II HD doesn't really justify it's existence well, other than the Forgotten expansion there's no real reason if you already have AOEII to buy this. The HD part of AOE2 is barely noticable, the game still looks decades old but now somethings are a bit more shinier.

The original flaws of AOE are still there, (four resources to gather for everything, a separate resource for castles, sword line of infantry has no real use and archers do their job ten times better, some of the maps have spawning problems with the boars)

As is the fun stuff, it's still great to play. The campaigns are still fun, all of it's there. But the price and the HD ness of it is rather unwelcome.

All in all I very modestly recommend it, but if you have the original AOE2 and aren't interested in the forgotten then you aren't missing anything here.

I honestly hate to say it but this game is a failed amazing idea.

To put it simply the complete lack of any significant single player content simply murders this game. The quests are bog standard, repetitive and dull. (Deliver message, kill bandit lair repeat ad nausem.) The noble interaction is a complete grind. About as bad as the Oblivion wheel where you basically just have to do the same tasks over and over again in order to get some count in the middle of nowhere to like and support you. It's dumb, not fun, and grinding to the highest degree. Has no excuse not to be improved.

The combat here is this game's saving grace. It's simple and fun, and the feeling of cutting through flesh with steel is satisfying and something I throughly enjoyed. But you must realize you are not doing that at least 70% of your single player game time. You are grinding something. Training your troops, relations, trading. It is a chore to get to do anything significant in this game. You start at the bottom of the barrel, and must work your way up. How do you get money? Grind. How do you train troops? Grind. How do you increase relations? You can guess.

In the single player. (Which I am primarily reviewing this game for, since most people probably play this game for it.) the combat like I said is fine, but the A.I is simply atrocious. It's one strategy is to zombie like rush you. If you are fighting 50 to 50, they will rush. 25-90, they will rush. 200-1, they will rush with that one little peasant. The individual combat with the A.I is just as much as a let down. They simply try and hug you, rushing into your chest and swinging wildly. There is no grace or cool swordplay. No clashing against swords as you are parrying difficult blows. It is a screaming half naked man charging you with an axe, and all his friends are just the same, charging completely mindlessly. This will get you killed, and often. And everytime it is simply frustrating and annoying. A neat feature I noticed is when enemies rush you, and the one in front has a single sword, but the one behind has a sword and shield. The one behind the sword enemy can actually block attacks aiming for the sword guy, the hitboxes mesh horribly togeter and make it a impenetrable wall of flesh that pretty much beats you to death.

You might argue up above is that you simply need a better army, or that the better trained troops use skill. No. A majestic Swadian Knight unhorsed will charge just as mindlessly as some Forest Bandit, it is simply unforgivable in a game like this. You fight armies of zombies with your own army of zombies. And since the process of getting troops trained is a death march grind, you'll probably cry when you see your elite Vaegir Knight get taken out by a bandit. That's two more hours of grinding for you!

The single player is 70% of the time a dull chore with no highpoints and a constant format of boredom. It's you taking your small party across the wartorn nation of Caldaria to deliver the epic message to Lord #453 so that way your little green bar with him will go up with him by one so you hope for ♥♥♥♥'s sake you can do something fun at some point.

In order to get to any semblance of fun with this game you have to climb a mountain of dullness to get a single cool battle of your zombie army against the others.

PROTIP: 40 well trained infantry troops on a hill can pretty much kill any party in this game. That's how garbage this A.I is.

This is a mindless grind at it's worst, only backed up by great and fun combat, which the game seems to try and do it's best into making not fun. This game would be 100x better as a series of battles or a campaign, not this aborted mess of a empty sandbox. Mods might save it, so if you must play this game I highly recommened Floris Mod, or you should probably just play Napleonic Wars since it is much, much better in all regards.

And there's a mutiplayer too as well. That about sums up the mutiplayer really, it's there, it's nice and you can play with your friends. But public matches are really messy. You're better off with Napleonic wars.

TL:DR you'll watch hours of your life waste away as you grind to get to some sort of fun spot in this game. I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hate it. And i'm going to play it again because I desperately want to get to that fun spot. I advise you stay far away and heed this lesson of dangerous addiction.