izigame.me

At its heart, Expeditions: Rome is a great CRPG with amazing turn-based combat, all set against the backdrop of the late Roman republic. Just to get it out of the way quick: The game is great, and while I have some criticisms to make, that doesn't mean the game isn't one of the better games I've played in a while. This is almost certainly my 2022 GOTY.
The Good:
- The turn-based tactical combat is done about as well in this game as it has ever been done in any game. The decisions you make during the combat are almost always meaningful, particularly while playing on the harder difficulty levels. It is incredibly satisfying to take on forces much larger than your own and come out on top.
- The game features interesting RPG companions with their own unique personalities, in the tradition of titles like Dragon Age. Unlike games like Dragon Age, here you get to take all of your companions with you on the main quests, so you never feel like you are missing out on one of them.
- The RPG dialogue and story decision points mostly feel very meaningful. There are multiple endings and multiple ways for things to play out depending on the decisions and dialogue choices you make.
The Meh:
- The game clocked in at 46 hours for me which, for my tastes, is a little on the long side of things. There is some flab that could have been cut, which I'll get to later.
- You essentially have two teams to go on missions with you. On the one hand you have the A-team, which consists of your main story companions, all decked out in the best gear. Then you have the B-team, which is a team of faceless mooks that you hire at the start of every Act. The game essentially forces you to use the B-team during "pacification" missions (these are the missions you have to go on to fully take control of a province during the campaign). At the end of each Act, the game typically has a large set-piece battle where you combine your A and B teams together (which is cool). The problem with the B-team is that they are generally less leveled and geared than your main A-team, which makes their missions artificially tougher than they ought to be. On top of that, these guys have no personality so, unlike your companions, they just aren't that much fun to be around and play with. In theory, I believe they were going with an "X-Com" kind of vibe with the B-team, where you grow attached to these other squaddies and you have those painful moments when your favorite or most useful teammate gets killed during a mission. In practice, these guys don't have enough personality to care about and you don't even end up learning their name, let alone get attached to them in any way. It is an attempt at something, but it falls a bit flat.
- The game has crafting, but it never felt like an interesting decision to make. Every new Act means the equipment in the area goes up a level, which means its time to craft new stuff. Again, it falls flat and feels unnecessary.
- You get the opportunity to upgrade your legion camp as the game goes along, but here again it never feels like an interesting decision. You just upgrade as you go and you never really have to think about getting one upgrade over another. Another game system that falls kind of flat.
The Bad:
- The UI is a bit clunky and doesn't communicate everything that it needs to you. The game is filled with status effects and little combat modifiers, but I'll be damned if I found out where the game told me about half of them. Moreover, I should be able to know when the enemy archer has a line of site on my characters or not, but the game gives you no indication. I can't even count how many times I thought I was in full cover, only to be shot in the face by an enemy archer during their turn.
- The game consists of overworld maps, where you move around armies and take your character's main party to various locations, and then the detailed scenes of the various locations that your party arrives in. Those detailed scenes are often very large, and often very empty. Many times a quest will have you go to one of these scenes, force you to walk all the way across it to talk to some NPC, and then walk all the way back to the exit. The game could really use a "leave area now" button. Moreover, at the end of combat you have to go around and scavenge the bits off of the bodies of your fallen foes. This process takes forever, is rarely rewarding, and feels like it could be totally streamlined out.
- The voice acting is generally excellent, so this is kind of a personal nitpick, however, they made this very odd choice of mixing in the Latin pronunciations of certain words that we would otherwise anglicize in our daily lives. It is incredibly jarring to be reading a subtitle in your head such as "Julius Caeser and the Legate came up with plans on how to use their Centurions to command their legionnaires", and then the voice actor gets there and says "YOU-LIUS KAI-AYE-ZAR and the LA-GAH-TAYE came up with plans on how to use their "KEN-TOURY-ONAYS" to command their "LEGGY-ON-ARAYS". Like I said, it is jarring, and by the time they get to Act three most of the voice actors can't even agree upon how to pronounce the new names and words that are coming up (seriously, "Vercingetorix" must be pronounced five different ways in the game).
The Ugly:
- If you've read other reviews then you know by now that the legion combat on the overworld map is just terrible. It consists of picking one of three random cards for four separate phases of battle. Whoever has the most troops left at the end wins. The cards you get to pick from are totally random (you can't craft a deck), and most of the time the differences between the cards are negligible anyway, so it never feels like you are making a meaningful decision. Unfortunately, you do more of these annoying legion battles than you do just about anything else in the game. The worst part of these battles is that they are so clearly a missed opportunity for an actually good, well thought out battle system that I'm sure these developers could come up with, given that the main tactical combat system they made is so good. It is just a shame.
- The "random encounters" are infuriating. While traveling on the overworld map with your party, you will frequently be waylaid by random encounters. Some of these are interesting and at first they add flavor to the proceedings, but by the end of the game you'll find that 90% of these encounters boil down to "x,y party members are injured", which functionally means you have to stop whatever it is you were doing with your party, march them back to your camp, and then wait the 30 hours for them to heal up before you can go back to doing whatever it is you wanted to do in the first place. Like many things in the game, it feels like an artificial speed bump to slow your progress, and it becomes incredibly annoying as time goes on.
Okay, enough grousing. The game is almost perfect, so go buy it. It has some issues, mostly pertaining to extra fluff that they've layered on top of the otherwise excellent CRPG and turn-based combat bits. This extra stuff only serves to slow the game down and drag out the run-time. The final Act of the game basically does away with all the extraneous bits, and it is absolutely the best paced part of the game. I hope they learn from that for the next entry in the series, which I'm absolutely going to play now regardless.