Likely worth it. Reviews lean strongly positive.
At $39.99. It has been as low as $19.48.
- Story and characters: 53 reviews raised it, mostly praise
- Gameplay: 44 reviews raised it, mostly praise
- Interface: 22 reviews raised it, mostly praise
- Crashes: 11 reviews raised it, mostly criticism
- Bugs: 7 reviews raised it, mostly criticism
Based on 868 player reviews · updated 6 days ago
What players think
The recurring themes across 300 analysed reviews: what players praise, what divides them, and what to know.
If You play(ed) TW-Rome, but You actually were attracted more in the grand campaign and less in playing the battles, but the strategy map was to shallow.
It has an actual functioning diplomacy system, dynamism, tons of replayability, and long/fulfilling campaigns.
The management of the empire is made easy by an excellent interface; I praise the choice made by developers to introduce a degree randomness in the choice of regional upgrades (and the neeed for a sort of "specialization": overall the regional upgrade system is very clever, as how the trade has been depicted) or political acts (it is not a god-game and the chance of a lunatic or inept ruler has to be simulated in some way; I should add however that developers opted to leave out acts such as turning horses into senators or whipping the sea).
PBEM+ multiplayer is a joy; if a little slow.
It also makes for varied decisions, as each building's value shifts situationally in ways that make for endless permutations of interesting short-list decisions, rather than one global optimized build queue -- This one, or this other one?!
There is easily enough gameplay here to give the best of Paradox's strategy games a run for their money, and with no extra expensive dlc to buy.
Theme by theme
Every theme is scored by what reviewers actually said about it, not just whether they recommended the game.
Ranked by how many sampled reviews mention each topic. A topic sits in a column by what reviewers said about that topic; the percentage beside it is how many of them recommended the game anyway. One more theme was raised by fewer than 6 sampled reviews and is not shown.
Should you buy it now?
Crit’s read on the price, from Steam price history.
Currently $39.99. The lowest we've tracked is $19.48.
The data behind the verdict
For the players who want the receipts.
We’ll surface hours-played once playtime ingestion ships.
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