Reviews by charidotes20

Nautical nonsense, check.
Pineapple under the sea, check.
Pet snail, check.

This show is so effortlessly win.

(10/10)

I suppose it was okay, but not great, just OK. No huge flaws spring to mind, just a lack of a certain something. The mechanics were passable, but the game lacked a certain depth, lacked spirit, at least for me. Something about the story/backstory, I guess. Whatever it was, the thing felt flat to me. 2D.

(7/10)

It's a good game; kindof a tactical turn-based kind of thing, storyline/campaign-heavy. It works.

....

But, you know....

It doesn't.

It's not *fun*.

Come on.

(6/10)

1. Everyone who disagrees with me is bad.
2. You disagree with me.
3. Checkmate.

(5/10)

Once upon a time, there was a church flick which was about as subtle as a boot to your face. Then one day, it got force-fed to me. The End.

(5/10)

The game was basically set up in mostly the same way as Rome: Total War, even though ancient Rome and medieval Europe were *very, very different*. And, basically this game recreates most the most stupid and frustrating things about Rome: Total War, and without most of its good things. Additional difficulties include the map, for example, which was *way too small* (because it was *way too similar* the R:TW map) so that you could conquer a medium-to-large sized kingdom like Spain or England by taking two, three, or maybe four cities--if medieval campaigning had really been this easy and simple, I guess the Holy Roman Emperor would have conquered all of Europe in about five years, and made it all the way to China in another three or four....also, I personally found it pretty perverse that the game gave you only one thing to do--conquest, there was no other challenge the game gave you, and yet when you tried to do this one thing you were allowed to do, the Pope excommunicated you and all your armies defected. Theoretically, this sounds like it alleviates the conquer-the-world-in-an-afternoon problem. In reality it just makes the whole thing that much more absurd...I'm going to stop now before I start spitting.

(4/10)

Mostly the same as the original game, just with a new campaign map and everything. Not really as fun as the original, though.

....

In the end, the differences were more trivial than they were made to appear.

(6/10)

While it's easy to point out elements that were overblown....the 'RPG'-like elements of the generals was sorta wierd and arbitrary...I mean, if a general constantly fought battles, he eventually got to be a really good military leader, but other than that it was impossible, or almost impossible, to make sure that the govenors of your cities got a good education, or even decent advisors (I'm an absolute ruler, and I can't even appoint advisers to the govenors of cities so that they won't piss away *all* of the money?)...the 'historical-ness' of the whole thing was so completely absurd--I'll confine myself to pointing out that the three different Roman factions (yes, *three different* Roman factions) were run in a European-medieval hereditary/dynastic sort of way, while the City of Rome and the Roman Senate was dipicted as a *separate country* from the rest of the Roman State, as though it were some kind of wierd feudal system--that gives you an idea of the historicalness of it.....and the 'turn-based' elements were also overblown, since there were never really any meaningful strategic decisions to make, it was just--big armies = good, use big armies to conquer much land = good idea, anything else = bad bad idea. And there was no diplomacy, since everyone declared war on you eventually, so the only thing to do was to wipe them out first.

So it was basically just an RTS--the part that mattered was the real-time battles. But since these were done pretty well, it was actually pretty cool. Yes, one battle did tend to go in much the same way as the one before, but it still seemed realistic enough to hold my attention. Basically, you used your army to conquer cities, and then used the money to increase the number and quality of your units, and replentish losses. Cities were basically bases for your armies, to supply them. So the thing was to conquer cities (and defeat armies so you could conquer cities) and you had to learn what your units were good at, and what they weren't good at, and how to minimize your losses while defeating, routing, and wiping out the enemy. You could technically let the CPU manage the battles for you, but this was always a bad bad idea, commanding battles was basically the point of the whole game and you had to do it well if you wanted to win. And it was fun, especially since each unit was composed of many individual soldiers, which made it seem realistic, and the general always gave an amusing speech to rouse the troops to an appropriate level of bloodthirstiness before the army entered the fray. ("I want to see blood. I want to bath in their blood! I want to bath in their blood for a week! So....kill them all!!!)

So, it worked.

....

Oh yeah, this was spectacular. Just like 'Star Wars: Empire at War'.

Yeeahh....

A little perspective makes alot of the.... littler details blur together.

Like, when they mesh together the different kinds of empire games into one, sloppy mess of a.... generic empire game.

(6/10)

The mechanics are mostly the same as EU3, but they make somewhat more sense in this historical context--being able to conquer the world as Rome sorta makes sense, since Rome really did conquer the world...whereas in EU3 anyone who plays as France can overrun all of Europe if they really want to, mostly because the game doesn't really understand how European diplomacy worked during that period. (They do their best with "belligerence" points and "casus belli" and the rest of it, but it's a system designed to be exploited.) With EU: Rome, this is slightly less insane, and I'll admit that the colonization system was pretty interesting and fun. Although it ended up being very easy to colonize all of Gaul and the rest of it (competent resistence from the "barbarians" notwithstanding) while completely ignoring the big, organized empires, like, oh I don't know, Carthage. In the real world, it would have been completely impossible for Rome to just forget about the empires of the Mediterranean and the *trade routes*. (The game has trade routes, but mostly its just a local thing--it's mostly just your provinces trading with each other, which means it's essentially just another reward for conquests, at the bottom of it.) In reality Rome became the prime power of the Mediterranean by ruining Carthage in a long series of brutal struggle-to-the-death type wars, and even in any plausible embellishment or deviation from reality, Rome would still have to gain control of the Mediterranean--the Grecian empires of the East and Egypt & Africa and their grain fields-- to be the empire it was. In the game, you're not really challenged to do anything hard if you don't want to, and the game makes you feel good as long as you slowly increases your number of provinces, and the size of your treasury and army, and all you have to do to do that is plant a bunch of random colonies in a bunch of random places in the wilderness...or conquer some tiny "barbarian" duchy (really, deep down, they're just 17th or 18th century dutchies, given ancient names--its mechanics are based on the age of European discovery and colonization) and then wait for its "culture" to magically and spontaneously change from "Celtic" to "Roman", like, poof.

It did pass the time though.

(7/10)

I thought the expansions were going to make it better!

....

Lenard: I've always been a little confused about this-- why don't Hindus eat beef?

Raj: We believe cows are gods.

Sheldon: Not technically. In Hinduism cattle are thought to be *like* gods.

Raj: Do not tell me about my own culture, Sheldon! In the mood I'm in, I'll take you out, I swear to cow!

(6/10)