Expeditions: Rome

Clearly not built in a day

- IAN EVENDEN

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 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.