"While Rome: Total War is one of the best strategy games ever made, Total War: Rome Remastered is perhaps the worst Total War game ever released. "
Singleplayer.
Co-op Multiplayer.
PvP Multiplayer.
This review is focused on the changes introduced by Total War: Rome Remastered; you can read our full review of Rome: Total War here.
As someone who loves Total War games and has invested thousands of hours of playtime into the franchise, I must admit that Total War: Rome Remastered is a huge disappointment.
Due to its fundamentally broken single-player mode, I have no desire to play it despite it being a decent remaster in almost every other aspect.
Before I go into detail as to why Total War: Rome Remastered is perhaps the worst Total War game ever released, It is only fair to point out the good things about Total War: Rome Remastered and give credit where it is due.
Total War: Rome Remastered looks fantastic and performs much better on modern hardware than Rome: Total War. This makes battles featuring updated camera controls far more enjoyable.
The economy is slightly more interesting thanks to the addition of a merchant unit, first seen in Medieval II: Total War.
The addition of more playable factions right from the start is fun and a great way to increase replayability, and it’s great to see that the Barbian Invasion DLC now has more playable factions than ever before.
Finally, for players interested in playing custom or historical battles, Total War: Rome Remastered is a better game than Rome Total War in almost every way.
However, custom/historical battles (while very enjoyable) are only a fraction of the reason most people play Total War games, and it is when we start to look at the single-player campaigns that everything starts to fall apart at the seams.
The main issue with Total War: Rome Remastered is AI factions are broken when it comes to player interactions and diplomacy.
Modern Total War games are very nuanced about why a certain faction likes or dislikes another faction, while Rome Total War was much more simplistic.
When the simple diplomacy system from Rome: Total War was “improved upon” for the remaster, it appears the developers did not consider that more complex systems require a more complex diplomatic base to work from, which Total War: Rome Remastered simply does not have.
Because of this, the AI reacts in a far more primitive manner, which can best be summed up as primal.
No matter how close you have been to a faction politically, no matter how good you have been to them, heck, even if you haven’t once trespassed and even sent them loads of goodies and fair trade deals, the moment you are neighbours, most factions will break any and all agreements and go to war with the player.
In a recent game, I was allied with Germania and Britannia, and all three of us were at war with Gaul. However, the moment I captured a settlement that bordered both of my “allies,” they declared war and began attacking every settlement of mine they could reach, which brings me to my next issue with Total War: Rome Remastered, Doomstacks.
For those who do not play Total War games often, the term Doomstack refers to an army which is filled to capacity with high-ranked and/or powerful units that are very difficult to defeat for the enemy, while also being very costly to maintain and even more costly to replace.
Fielding even a single doom stack is a huge achievement early in the game and requires a robust economy to support and a large chain of upgraded buildings to produce.
Yet the AI can produce an abundence of these within moments of war beginning and send them in a near-constant stream at the player.
In a recent game of Total War: Rome Remastered, I defeated 3 Gaul doom stacks and was only able to replace a handful of my units before the same defeated Gaul general returned at the head of another army; this kept happening turn after turn until eventually, my defenders died of attrition despite having a robust economy and queuing the max amount of reinforcements/new units possible between each turn.
What made it even more apparent that the AI was cheating was that they had only a few small settlements remaining and only one within a single-turn radius of the settlement they were attacking.
Yet despite this reality, they were able to pump out around 40-60 units per turn, while my own faction, with around a dozen medium-large settlements with upgraded buildings, could barely output 30, and even then, most of my units were far more than a single turn from the front line, with most reinforcements from other settlements being at least two turns away.
I enjoy a challenge, but playing against a cheating AI is no more fun than playing against human cheaters.
While some people suggest using Romeshell (a developer command console that allows cheats), I find reward in “cheating” either, even if it is against an AI not playing by the rules.
While we have discussed neighbours from hell attacking sight, this is not the only example of anti-player bias. AI factions randomly declare war on the player even if they have never encountered them prior to their diplomat encountering one of the player settlements or units.
In a recent game I had a diplomat from a faction in the far east travel all the way to Rome to declare war on me, despite the faction being so far away they never even came within half a dozen turns of my most remote outpost prior to this encounter.
Just to clarify, this faction has no prior dealings with me. I had not invaded its lands or that of its allies, nor dealt with them unfairly; they simply opted to attack me for no reason other than I was a human player.
Actions like this are not only frustrating but immersion-breaking, and a far cry the high level of diplomatic relations possible in Total War Rome II, where I am currently in a game in which Rome maintains long-term alliances with multiple AI factions., and war with AI factions only occurs for valid reasons, such as they do not appreciate the way I treated their friends or allies or if they notice I am expanding my territory at an alarming rate (which I am!).
While a few mods try to fix this, many also change up other aspects of the game (such as new units or forced auto taxation), which, for me, ruins the experience of playing the game as it was originally intended.
Please understand me. I appreciate the Total War: Rome Remastered mod community and the work they do.
However, I am not a fan of mods that add additional content to mechanics.
I prefer to play the games as close as possible to the developer’s original vision, and I shouldn’t have to install mods or use cheats to play the game without it turning into a nightmare scenario of every AI faction declaring war the moment they encounter me.
While I appreciate the developers’ desire to make Rome: Total War more user-friendly, the system they chose to redesign (agent management) did not need a redesign at all.
The new agent management system accomplishes only what the original did while making the process of managing agents more complex for new and returning players.
If any system needed an overhaul, it was the replenishment/reinforcement system, which make maintaining a frontier force far more difficult than most Total War titles.
While I appreciate how immersive it makes the campaigns feel, Total War titles are normally a great mix of immersion and ease of use, and after over a decade of playing Total War titles that handled unit replenishment and recruitment in much better ways, being forced to use the archaic system from Rome Total War feels like a step backwards, especially when the developers have shown they are not concerned about changing core mechanics, and even in the case of agent management redesigning them from the ground up.
Total War: Rome Remastered is a 4x strategy video game developed by Feral Interactive and published by CREATIVE ASSEMBLY, it was released on 29 April 2021 and retails for $29.99.
Total War: Rome Remastered is available exclusively on PC.
The following peripherals are officially supported:
Total War: Rome Remastered is rated PEGI 12+ and contains:
While I wanted to like Total War: Rome Remastered, I just can’t. The Campain AI is broken beyond comprehensive, and while it is really pretty to look at, performs well, and has many quality-of-life features that improve upon the original release, none of this matters when the singleplayer campaign is barely playable when using Romeshell (cheats) or third party mods are required to stop neutral and even allied factions from turning hostile for no apparent reason.
If you can pick up Total War: Rome Remastered on sale, it is worth getting for historical battles and access to the far superior original version.
Beyond that, I see no reason to buy or play Total War: Rome Remastered until the campaign AI is overhauled to a more workable state, especially when Total War: Rome II exists and, after many years and improvements, is a true and worthy successor to Rome: Total War in every way.
We found Total War: Rome Remastered to be a poor game, meaning that while it has some redeeming qualities, it's ultimately disappointing and not recommended for most gamers.
