Maximum PC - USA (2022-04)

TACTICAL

ROLE-

PLAYING

GAME^

© THQ NORDIC

Clearly not built in a day

Expeditions: Rome

AS A SETTING, ancient Rome has much to

recommend it. There’s the strong military

culture, the mad gods, the orgies, the

wine, gladiators, philosophers in togas

(or was that Greece?), and a general lack

of medical care.

Expeditions: Rome takes that military

culture and spins it into a turn-based RPG

in which you, as the scion of a famous

leader, take command of armies and do

an awful lot of talking. It starts off small,

as you lead a disparate group you’ve met

on a boat to Lesbos to kill guards and blow

up ships with Greek fire, but scales into

the command of whole legions, besieged

cities, and doing more and more of the

aforementioned conversing.

Standing between you and all this is

the character creator, which allows you to

create a custom-ish character—options

are limited and we never really felt like

we were in control—and then choose a

2D portrait that appears in dialog that

looks nothing like the 3D model. Having

chosen a portrait with lustrous curly hair

Head for Lesbos and see how

much damage you can cause.

after swords have been sheathed. At least

the prompt exists. There’s some amusing

text in the popups that open over things

like game difficulty choices right at the

beginning of the game, pointing to a studio

that’s enjoying what it does and expects

you to as well.

Given its setting, it's perhaps ironic

to criticize the game for feeling old-

fashioned, with its curious overhead

camera that doesn’t allow you to zoom out

far enough or tilt over to see particularly

far ahead, and things like the first two

military camps you visit being completely

identical, that’s certainly the impression.

Conversations also feel basic—they are

essentially dialogs between your 2D

character portrait and other characters,

with responses directly selectable, and

new ones opened up depending on your

character traits.

If you don’t feel like talking, there’s

always a fight to be had. Combat is based

around movement and actions, your

single action point allowing you to get a hit

and the face of actor Eddie Redmayne,

we were then unable to match it with the

3D character choices, all of whom looked

more like Russell Crowe. It’s possible to

create female characters too, with the

game referencing the expected roles of

women in Roman society even as you

make your way up the military ladder.

Developer Logic Artists has produced

historical RPGs before and has worked

on a canceled (or placed on hold for ‘an

unspecified period of time’) project with

Larian Studios, the minds behind Divinity:

Original Sin and Baldur’s Gate 3. As you’d

expect from such experienced hands,

the actual RPG mechanics—the leveling

up and allocation of skills—is smoothly

handled. You get one skill point per level

gained and choose a new ability from skill

trees that are all available at the start,

based on the class you chose.

It works nicely, although it’s possible

to miss the actual moment of leveling

up in the heat of combat and have to be

prompted by an ‘unused skill point’ popup

in the lab

90 MAXIMU MPC APR 2022