Your legion calls, Legatus. Will you heed them? Expeditions: Rome is a new tactical role-playing game (RPG) from THQ Nordic, that sees the player don the armor of a Roman noble trying to succeed in the world and find vengeance against those that have wronged them From commanding a legion to growing relationships with the citizens around you, Expeditions: Rome finds the player making choices that will impact not only the story at large but how your soldiers and other Romans view you. With a multitude of in-depth systems and truly challenging battles, developer Logic Artists have immersed us in a historical tale that isn’t afraid to tell you you’re the bad guys. Maybe you can change that opinion somewhat, and make Rome great again.

Story

Expeditions: Rome starts with your customizable character fleeing Rome after the death of their father, suspected to be foul play by the family that just married your sister. You are to be a part of the command staff of a legion, run by Lucius Licinius Lucullus, a friend of your father and one of the consuls of Rome. In short order, you are placed in charge of the newly formed Legio Victrix. While the story quickly splits from the actual history, you are destined to fill the power vacuum after misfortune befalls a well-known historical character. As you find glory on the battlefield and in your command, you must balance the precarious situation unfolding for your family in Rome, and take care to keep the Pretorians who make up your personal guard happy.

Surprisingly, the RPG elements of the game are quite apparent early on. Making the decision to allow a traitor to live can have unexpected positive consequences, as can not heeding the call of a Greek holy man. The characters you meet on your journey are a huge part of that RPG enjoyment, with numerous voice lines and a fully voiced story that does a fantastic job of putting the player into the sandals of their character.

Gameplay

As a tactical RPG, Expeditions: Rome features two different modes of play. The campaign map is where you can view the terrain and locations around your party, send your legion on missions, capture outposts, and find loot locations. To improve your legion, you’ll do missions to gain resources and capture supply points to upgrade different buildings within your legion camp. As you move around, your party will often have encounters that can be resolved through different decisions, all leading to interesting results. Whether positive or negative depends on you and your choices thus far. While you do not necessarily lead your legion into battles, you do decide who is in charge and what strategies they use in combat. Keeping your legion happy and well supplied, as well as headed by strong leaders, will allow you to keep your losses to a minimum and focus on accomplishing your main quests.

As you wander around, you must take care of your personal guard of pretorians, characters you find and recruit throughout the game. Equip them with weapons and items to keep them strong in combat, which is where this game really begins to shine. When you go to a specific place or do certain missions, you must lead your party in a turn-based battle, featuring cover and defense systems that are easy to learn yet difficult to master. Each turn will have you moving different members of your team and performing attacks or other abilities, trying to win in battles where you are frequently outnumbered. This turn-based portion of gameplay is difficult at first, and I had to restart quite a few missions because of losing everybody I took into battle. Not the most glorious of outcomes for a new roman general.

As I played through the first act of Expeditions: Rome, I kept being surprised at how hard it was on the normal difficulty. Enemies would frequently overwhelm any soldiers I had out of place, and facing off against more than 15 enemies to my 6 pretorians would often give the turn-based battles a tense and hectic feeling, with much celebration once all my enemies fell to a well-timed set of attacks. The combat is fun and tactically advanced, causing me to continuously develop new strategies as the game threw different roadblocks and opponents at me. Two huge parts of these developing strategies were character classes and injuries.

There are four classes, all with their own weapons and combat style. Each class has three skill trees, offering situational skills or passive bonuses. These classes are standard RPG fare, with a heavy tank (Princeps), archer (Sagittarius), melee assassin (Veles), and a healer/longer-ranged melee class (Triarius). Each of them has its strengths and weaknesses, and selecting your party for combat is as important as what you do with them in battle. Keeping them well equipped can be the difference between life and death, and an in-depth crafting/loot system has you scavenging battlefields to find recipes and parts to craft more powerful weapons and armor, as well as bandages, bombs, and throwing weapons.

When your men fall in combat, they aren’t necessarily dead. After losing all their health, they will collapse to the ground, take an injury, and start bleeding out. Even if you stabilize them and save their lives, they will be injured until they can rest at the medical tent or have someone in the party perform first aid. If you take a lightly injured soldier into battle, you risk the chance of having their injury getting worse or them dying. As each of your soldiers level up and unlock more skills, it becomes more heartbreaking to lose even one of your pretorians.

Expeditions: Rome’s gameplay is surprisingly enjoyable after you get used to it, with tough and exciting combat sequences broken up by legion management and grand strategy. While I was originally uncertain about the gameplay loops you encounter, each of the instances is well thought out, the characters are a joy to interact with, and the battles are fun even if they are frustrating at times.

Audio and Visuals

The Expedition: Rome soundtrack is great, with many different themes and moods across the game. Battle music heightens the tension while the campaign map is more relaxed, and having moments of political intrigue at a party becomes more immersive with the soft tones of background music. The voice acting is really where the audio shines though, with each of your main characters having wonderfully voiced scenes. The story became more engaging and the characters more interesting, causing me to want to spend more time interacting with them outside of certain story events.

The overall art direction is very clean, with a lot of variances depending on the region. The sands of the desert, Greek temples, and the beautiful city of Rome itself are all original and still stunning to walk through. The combat maps are all different, and so far I haven’t seen a repeating battle scene unless I go back to the site of the battle after the fact. As the soldiers engage, spurts of blood coat the ground around, leading to a gory scene after a fight breaks out.

Replayability

At this moment, there is no DLC for Expeditions: Rome. As with any game with a large campaign, the desire to replay will be different for everyone. Branching stories in each act could have players wanting to play it again to make different choices, and the battles are enjoyable enough to want to have more even as the campaign comes to a close.

What It Could Have Done Better

While the game ran fantastically, there were random issues that came up throughout gameplay. AI units would sometimes have glitches or odd behavior, and the pathing for both player-controlled characters and the AI could definitely use an overhaul. Some of the battle sequences became overly bloated as the enemy and allied turns could take a long time, with each move being completed fully before the next could start. The UI was pretty, but also very bulky. The option to reduce UI size would definitely be an improvement, especially with the size of some of the tooltips. Of all of the management systems, there could have been easier ways to deal with inventory and crafting. Some sort of mass-dismantle would have saved me a lot of time holding right-click on dozens of useless weapons, and being forced to wander the map after a battle to pick up loot made the pathing issues stand out tenfold.

Verdict

Despite minor issues with the UI and some longer-than-anticipated battle sequences, Expeditions: Rome is an absolute blast! For history nerds (like myself), this tactical RPG has everything you can ask for. Wonderful characters that flesh out an exciting story, full of intrigue, heroics, and even some romance. The combat is crunchy and well put together, often leading to the dreaded ‘one more turn’ that spells doom for getting a full night’s sleep. If you enjoy turn-based combat, this is definitely one for you. While my RPG fans may bemoan the strategy style of gameplay, they will definitely enjoy playing through the well-crafted story and meeting some of the most memorable characters I have seen in recent times. If you aren’t so sure and want to see for yourself, there is a demo to try. Once you decide to buy, your progress in the demo will transfer to the full game.

Expeditions: Rome is out now on PC via Steam, Epic Games, and GOG.