Total War: Rome Remastered Review

Remasters and remakes are a great way to bring new life to old games that everyone can enjoy. Creative Assembly has teamed up with Feral Interactive, their long-time partner, to give Rome Total War, a classic Total War franchise, a second chance. Is Total War: Rome Remastered faithful to the original? If so, can it bring it to modern systems?

Creative Assembly released Rome: Total War (2004), a mix of turn-based strategy, real-time tactics, and turn-based strategy. It was published during the peak of the Roman Republic's fall and its eventual rebirth. Players must build and expand their cities, train their generals, create armies to go to war, recruit soldiers to fight them, and hire agents to spy on their competitors and negotiate with them. The ultimate goal is to conquer the Ancient Mediterranean. It is safe to say that the core gameplay loop and exciting premise still hold true today.

The remaster has five main goals. It aims to improve game performance on modern hardware and update the graphics. It also combines all Rome: Total War content into one package. It also aims to revive veterans and introduce new players while keeping the legacy of the original. This remaster is mostly successful on the technical side, but it fails to adapt and modernize the entire game. Even in those areas it succeeds, the remaster is not able to retain the classic appeal of the original.

The biggest achievements of the remaster are the improvements to Rome's customization, quality-of-life options, graphics and UI. It is much appreciated that the options menu has been expanded to include graphics, controls and gameplay. The updated controls and the in-battle UI customization options make it easier to control large units and allow players to customize how they interact with this game. I am able to remove the ugly, oversized unit stat bubbles and keep the unit banners.

The game's graphics are a marked improvement on the original. It has better textures, greater detail, and more unit models. It was impressive to see a legion in battle order in the original.

The new, oversaturated colors used for the campaign map are not my favorite. They highlight the strange-looking and immersion-breaking rivers with right angles. Although the original map had many of the same problems, the overall map was much more attractive and tessellated well. It did a better job hiding the limitations of the map's graphics. The color vibrancy setting isn't very helpful.

Total War: Rome Remastered performed well performance-wise. Although I experienced one crash and some unexplained frame drops during the campaign, it ran well enough.

Redesigned UI is the most significant change and improvement over the original. The UI redesign, which includes numerous tooltips and reorganized information as well as menu streamlining, helps to ease veterans and new players into the game. It also gives them immediate access to pertinent information. Although it will take some time to get used to, it is still better than the original.

Despite the UI's overall quality, it is still quite cumbersome with inefficient menu flipping. It is also strange that some components have tooltips or explanations, while others do not. There is a farm harvest quality system that provinces have, which can be checked on the provincial panel's population growth section and on the strategic overlay. However, it is not well explained, making the UI redesign a little uneven.

Feral also added new voice work and a revamped UI. The mix is mixed as many cutscenes are ill-executed and the VO's quality is poor with poor audio mixing and hit-or miss voice acting. The original sound design voices and the music are still as great as ever.

Total War: Rome Remastered also has a lot of content. Feral Interactive added, in addition to the cross-platform multiplayer functionality and all expanded content such as the 2005 Barbarian invasion expansion and the 2006 Alexander spin-off mini campaign. You will find plenty of battles and campaigns to choose from, and the remaster's enhanced modding capabilities will help to increase the game's longevity.

It is a hassle switching between the programs, which is annoying. The game will require players to quit completely and then select their preferred content using a pre-launcher. All three components share in-game assets.

It seems that Feral developers took "retaining the spirit of the original" too literally. They have retained not only the good but also the bad. The worst elements have aged badly are the horrible AI, unit pathfinding and the auto-resolve systems, agents, factions and unit rosters.

It's not clear that developers spent time improving the AI. The AI in Total War is an ongoing issue, as is other strategy games. However, this AI is terrible. It's serviceable in open-field battles but it breaks in sieges. AI units are either huddled around the central plaza or dancing in place, waiting for their death.

Campaign AI is mostly irrational. A faction may offer a player an alliance, then attack them in the next turn. This chaos can be frustrating and even dangerous to manage.

The horrible unit siege battle pathfinding goes hand in hand with the AI. Pathfinding works well in open-field battles. However, once units get into sieges, they will panic, become stuck on invisible walls and follow strange march routes. Pathfinding problems affect both the entire unit and each model. These issues, along with the AI make sieges a frustrating task to play. Players will want to avoid sieges entirely, auto-resolve them, or starve the enemy.

Auto-resolve is another issue that hasn’t aged well or been adequately addressed. Auto-resolve can be unfairly penalizing and cause frustrating breaks to the game's speed. Multiple times, I have witnessed half- or full-stack armies suffer unreasonable losses or lose to armies with far fewer troops. This encourages players to fight every battle manually. Imagine the frustration of fighting endless cleanup battles against an ineffective AI.

Campaign agents are one area in which AI excels. It is tedious to have to recruit a diplomat agent, then go through the fog of warfare to find an enemy to talk to. The AI is too attached to its agents and can cause hilarious situations where there's no place for the army or agents to move. The age-old strategy that sends so many bodies they block any army's path.

The AI's aggressiveness makes the new merchant agent, first introduced in Medieval 2 : Total War, hardly a noticeable addition. Although the merchant's impact is minimal, the AI will swarm merchants and buy them out. This leaves the player with little time to build their merchant or counteract effectively.

Total War: Rome Remastered's most aged features are the unit rosters and factions. Non-Roman faction unit lists are too simple or too specialized, and even the Romans can be affected by unit repetition depending on their actions and decisions. This problem isn't addressed by the campaign mercenary systems.

Feral saw unit rosters as a great opportunity to give new life to limited factions with little to offer. Macedon, both in the Alexander spinoff and the base game, is a good example. They have some important but small gaps in their rosters that can be filled by each other.

Feral Interactive has unlocked all factions previously locked for campaign play on a much larger scale. They didn't do the work of fleshing them out. Why unlock a faction that offers little or no value to campaign play? This is most evident in the base game's faction of Thrace. It has very few units and does not have any distinct features that can justify its existence.

Total War: Rome Remastered, in all, is a decent remaster that brings the original into the new age of gaming. The remaster feels professional and does not address the original's problems like some of the best remasters. It's almost as if developers have rewritten an essay, but modified the font and formatting to make it more appealing.