A dream come true for fans of both CRPGs and Roman history, usurp Julius Caesar's place in history. Very well done with engaging quests, companions, and interesting strategy elements. Lots of roleplay choices and a very fun combat system. Could've used more companion input, dialogue, and quests especially since they become more or less completely silent by the last two acts.
This game is currently in the Humble Choice for December 2023, and this is part of my coverage of the bundle. If you are interested in the game and it's before January 2nd, 2023, consider picking up the game as part of the current monthly bundle.
Exploring an ancient civilization through murder and dialogue trees.
Expeditions: Rome takes the CRPG genre and drops the player into the time period of Ancient Rome. Meeting Julius Caesar in the first scenes, players will take on the role of a man or woman who quickly ascends to a powerful military position and then joins the war efforts while trying to solve their father’s murder. The writing here is good, though it does use a lot of Roman terms so players might need to look those up for full comprehension. However, the story does seem interesting, and the battles are strategic and suitably large.
The Strategy RPG genre though is a mixed bag. While Expeditions: Rome does a great job of making it clear what each attack does, it also sometimes will feel unfair just due to how the genre uses random dice rolls. Also, the story has historical inaccuracies which won’t upset most fans, but feels odd because the game shows a lot of love for the period as well though that’s ignoring the pronunciation choices. And the tactical gameplay won’t appeal to everyone.
Pick this up if you liked the original Fallout games but can do with less humor. It’s a strategy RPG, where you get a large party, cruise around, talk to everyone, and wage war on an epic scale. It might be a bit of a niche, with its heavy story and long gameplay, but it’s also perfect for those who like the genre.
If you enjoyed this review or want to know what I think of other games in the bundle, check out the full review on or subscribe to my Youtube channel: https://youtu.be/FzxvEceV60k
Exploring an ancient civilization through murder and dialogue trees.
Expeditions: Rome takes the CRPG genre and drops the player into the time period of Ancient Rome. Meeting Julius Caesar in the first scenes, players will take on the role of a man or woman who quickly ascends to a powerful military position and then joins the war efforts while trying to solve their father’s murder. The writing here is good, though it does use a lot of Roman terms so players might need to look those up for full comprehension. However, the story does seem interesting, and the battles are strategic and suitably large.
The Strategy RPG genre though is a mixed bag. While Expeditions: Rome does a great job of making it clear what each attack does, it also sometimes will feel unfair just due to how the genre uses random dice rolls. Also, the story has historical inaccuracies which won’t upset most fans, but feels odd because the game shows a lot of love for the period as well though that’s ignoring the pronunciation choices. And the tactical gameplay won’t appeal to everyone.
Pick this up if you liked the original Fallout games but can do with less humor. It’s a strategy RPG, where you get a large party, cruise around, talk to everyone, and wage war on an epic scale. It might be a bit of a niche, with its heavy story and long gameplay, but it’s also perfect for those who like the genre.
If you enjoyed this review or want to know what I think of other games in the bundle, check out the full review on or subscribe to my Youtube channel: https://youtu.be/FzxvEceV60k
Expeditions: Rome is a very welcome surprise. It’s a very narrative-focused XCOM-like, or a CRPG with tactic and objective-based combat. Or it’s a mix of both and very refreshing for that same reason. It takes cues from Larian’s Divinity: Original Sin 2 (Rome’s developer, Logic Artists, were supposed to make a tactics Divinity spin-off) with its reactive elemental surfaces and extremely good voice acting, but keeps things focused and snappy, with dialogues never using more than two or three lines, back-and-forth conversations, and great 2D character art that immersive you in the cruel but extremely attractive world it presents. Everyone here is hot, so why not make companions romanceable? And they do – even if the romance arcs are a little sudden and rushed.
But combat is what you’ll be doing for 80% of the game, and it’s never boring thanks to its class variety and puzzle-like encounter design. The legion encounters are a different story. Simplistic in nature, neither challenging nor rewarding, they serve as a minigame in between main stories. But the fact that you have to grind them out to get resources or simply progress is what end up making them tedious.
Overall, Expeditions: Rome offers a great tightly packed story with memorable characters and dialogue, plenty of meaningful choices, and a surprisingly engaging tactical combat. The legion battles and conquest progression overstay their welcome, but never managed to bring down my enjoyment.
But combat is what you’ll be doing for 80% of the game, and it’s never boring thanks to its class variety and puzzle-like encounter design. The legion encounters are a different story. Simplistic in nature, neither challenging nor rewarding, they serve as a minigame in between main stories. But the fact that you have to grind them out to get resources or simply progress is what end up making them tedious.
Overall, Expeditions: Rome offers a great tightly packed story with memorable characters and dialogue, plenty of meaningful choices, and a surprisingly engaging tactical combat. The legion battles and conquest progression overstay their welcome, but never managed to bring down my enjoyment.
The overall narrative of the game is well-designed, and for the most part, the decision-making and the consequences of those decisions are very direct. In very few games have I spent this much time weighting my dialogue choices and analyzing the complex political and sociological network built under the hood.
The game is nonetheless quite raw, especially for the second one from the same studio in the same genre. The X-com-esque combat mechanics is not well balanced, with a lot of the abilities and skills being overwhelmingly useless. In most cases, relying on raw DMG per hit was good enough with the abundantly easily accessible tactical weapons doing the mess-cleanup job afterwards. Unfortunately, close turn-based combat is the strongest part of the game. The exploration aspect (both on the world map and in rather compact local maps) is boringly useless, while the legion skirmishes leave an impression of purely cosmetic additions, rather than the integral part of the game advanced which they absolutely should have been.
Despite the narrative and the overall plot being quite captivating and borderline addictive, the characters were devastatingly flat, cartoonish, and unlikeable. In other words, this game really is a ~50hr long history/ethics lesson, where the actual gaming and interactivity component was pretty much left out.
The game is nonetheless quite raw, especially for the second one from the same studio in the same genre. The X-com-esque combat mechanics is not well balanced, with a lot of the abilities and skills being overwhelmingly useless. In most cases, relying on raw DMG per hit was good enough with the abundantly easily accessible tactical weapons doing the mess-cleanup job afterwards. Unfortunately, close turn-based combat is the strongest part of the game. The exploration aspect (both on the world map and in rather compact local maps) is boringly useless, while the legion skirmishes leave an impression of purely cosmetic additions, rather than the integral part of the game advanced which they absolutely should have been.
Despite the narrative and the overall plot being quite captivating and borderline addictive, the characters were devastatingly flat, cartoonish, and unlikeable. In other words, this game really is a ~50hr long history/ethics lesson, where the actual gaming and interactivity component was pretty much left out.
Expeditions: Rome is a extremely well put together combination of CRPG, Tactics gameplay, and Civilization-like strategy.
The RPG part is pretty dope. There is a lot of dialogue choices you can make and that shit will affect you somehow. Whether its for an upcoming battle, for the next bit of strategy gameplay, or maybe how characters think of you. You have a party of people in this game, 5 of them being typical RPG party members, and then you can add an extra 8 from recruiting, like a XCOM game. They all have dispositions like "Greedy, Honest, Warmongering" and a lot of dialogue options will affect those, either boosting their loyalty to you, or diminishing it. tbh I'm not entirely sure how it affects the main party members, but the extra crew can straight up leave your ass if they hate you enough.
You also start the game by choosing what type of "unlock this tree of dialogue" perk you want, like how Pentiment does it. You do this game in Acts, in which you are leading some war campaign, and inbetween them you go back to Rome and do a lot of dialogue reacting off the campaign you just did, and affecting the next.
The tactics gameplay is super fun. At first, the game is fun, but I did dip into a part where I wasn't liking the classes in the game after a couple hours, then a couple hours later the game got fun again and stayed that way. It's your usual turn based tactics affair, set up your troops, move them, do their attack skills, watch enemies do their turn. It can be annoying how long NPC turns are because there can be A LOT of enemy/ally units in a battle, so that shit can just be a minute of waiting. It also has these missions where you have to pacify a region you conquer from the strategy side of the gameplay, and you have to send in people mostly from your extra party. I don't really like using my extra party a lot because I having to manage them and my main party is a little too much, but it became manageable once I could ignore them with the super cheese I unlocked (even before then I didn't really dislike it too much, but I would much rather prefer to just use my main party). I got one of my characters so beefed up with Unique loot and perk points that he, quite literally, could just one shot every enemy on the first turn he could move. I did miss getting to use all my classes skills, but then game turned into a fun puzzle of how I'm going to allow this guy to kill everyone cause you might need to flank enemies to make their defenses 0.
The strategy gameplay mainly consists of an overworld map that kind of looks like Civ, and lightly managing your army so you have enough battle points that you could attempt to fight and take over other territories. Once you fight, it loads up a battlefield where it randomly pops up 3 strategies that affect your main 4 stats. There are a lot of number threshholds, up to 12, down to -12, that will affect the battle (i.e. -150 manpower, -50 missing soldiers, +25% player defence, Loot at end of battle). You gotta manage these numbers so you dont lose the tug of war bar at the top of the screen and try not to lose too many soldiers. You can also recruit 4 party members to lead your army and they add passive numbers those 4 main stats (they are also affected by loyalty and can just steal loot from the end of the battle if they don't like you).
Overall I think all the gameplay in this game is fun and engaging. I didn't even talk about the writing, which I think is really good. Like you do have the option of being a male or female, and (like another review I saw) I can't even imagine how huge a difference being a male is. It is always hammering that people won't accept you being a female military leader. There is a point where you seriously have to consider marrying a guy because you could lose your house if you don't. Its just such an interesting facet of the story if you are female, having do deal with this stupid ancient bullshit. The party members are all good too, I enjoy all their arcs. So yeah, good ass game.
The RPG part is pretty dope. There is a lot of dialogue choices you can make and that shit will affect you somehow. Whether its for an upcoming battle, for the next bit of strategy gameplay, or maybe how characters think of you. You have a party of people in this game, 5 of them being typical RPG party members, and then you can add an extra 8 from recruiting, like a XCOM game. They all have dispositions like "Greedy, Honest, Warmongering" and a lot of dialogue options will affect those, either boosting their loyalty to you, or diminishing it. tbh I'm not entirely sure how it affects the main party members, but the extra crew can straight up leave your ass if they hate you enough.
You also start the game by choosing what type of "unlock this tree of dialogue" perk you want, like how Pentiment does it. You do this game in Acts, in which you are leading some war campaign, and inbetween them you go back to Rome and do a lot of dialogue reacting off the campaign you just did, and affecting the next.
The tactics gameplay is super fun. At first, the game is fun, but I did dip into a part where I wasn't liking the classes in the game after a couple hours, then a couple hours later the game got fun again and stayed that way. It's your usual turn based tactics affair, set up your troops, move them, do their attack skills, watch enemies do their turn. It can be annoying how long NPC turns are because there can be A LOT of enemy/ally units in a battle, so that shit can just be a minute of waiting. It also has these missions where you have to pacify a region you conquer from the strategy side of the gameplay, and you have to send in people mostly from your extra party. I don't really like using my extra party a lot because I having to manage them and my main party is a little too much, but it became manageable once I could ignore them with the super cheese I unlocked (even before then I didn't really dislike it too much, but I would much rather prefer to just use my main party). I got one of my characters so beefed up with Unique loot and perk points that he, quite literally, could just one shot every enemy on the first turn he could move. I did miss getting to use all my classes skills, but then game turned into a fun puzzle of how I'm going to allow this guy to kill everyone cause you might need to flank enemies to make their defenses 0.
The strategy gameplay mainly consists of an overworld map that kind of looks like Civ, and lightly managing your army so you have enough battle points that you could attempt to fight and take over other territories. Once you fight, it loads up a battlefield where it randomly pops up 3 strategies that affect your main 4 stats. There are a lot of number threshholds, up to 12, down to -12, that will affect the battle (i.e. -150 manpower, -50 missing soldiers, +25% player defence, Loot at end of battle). You gotta manage these numbers so you dont lose the tug of war bar at the top of the screen and try not to lose too many soldiers. You can also recruit 4 party members to lead your army and they add passive numbers those 4 main stats (they are also affected by loyalty and can just steal loot from the end of the battle if they don't like you).
Overall I think all the gameplay in this game is fun and engaging. I didn't even talk about the writing, which I think is really good. Like you do have the option of being a male or female, and (like another review I saw) I can't even imagine how huge a difference being a male is. It is always hammering that people won't accept you being a female military leader. There is a point where you seriously have to consider marrying a guy because you could lose your house if you don't. Its just such an interesting facet of the story if you are female, having do deal with this stupid ancient bullshit. The party members are all good too, I enjoy all their arcs. So yeah, good ass game.
Un sólido RPG táctico con una historia quizás algo estereotipada pero en la que rara vez tienes la agencia para tomar decisiones que ofrece este juego. Muy divertido y con muchas posibilidades para tener tu propio estilo de romano.
An RPG with a tactical battle system.
Expeditions: Rome takes players and throws them into Roman times, while you flee from enemies who kill your father, and look to make a name for yourself. You meet a lot of interesting characters, many of which are based on real people like this member of my party Gaius Julius Caesar. I wonder if he’s known for anything. Now, I probably mispronounced it, but the game does an amazing job pronouncing each character’s name, and shows a love of the time period, even if it’s not always fully accurate.
While the opening had several interesting battles that all felt different, this is a game that feels like it’ll eventually devolve into the typical “kill everyone you see” or fail to create interesting locations. The dialogue works well but does seem to fall into the binary moral systems just with more categories represented at times. The movement outside of combat requires the player to wait until their entire party does some action like climbing a ladder.
Pick this up if you’re a fan of Roman times, or want to play an RPG. Expeditions: Rome is good, and the writing and characters are interesting, however it switches between RPG sections with heavy dialogue and combat sections with minimal dialogue often. Still, I'm interested to see where this game goes and what happens to the characters in it.
If you want to see more from me: Check out my video on this month of Game Pass games: https://youtu.be/tgNS9djM5ak
Expeditions: Rome takes players and throws them into Roman times, while you flee from enemies who kill your father, and look to make a name for yourself. You meet a lot of interesting characters, many of which are based on real people like this member of my party Gaius Julius Caesar. I wonder if he’s known for anything. Now, I probably mispronounced it, but the game does an amazing job pronouncing each character’s name, and shows a love of the time period, even if it’s not always fully accurate.
While the opening had several interesting battles that all felt different, this is a game that feels like it’ll eventually devolve into the typical “kill everyone you see” or fail to create interesting locations. The dialogue works well but does seem to fall into the binary moral systems just with more categories represented at times. The movement outside of combat requires the player to wait until their entire party does some action like climbing a ladder.
Pick this up if you’re a fan of Roman times, or want to play an RPG. Expeditions: Rome is good, and the writing and characters are interesting, however it switches between RPG sections with heavy dialogue and combat sections with minimal dialogue often. Still, I'm interested to see where this game goes and what happens to the characters in it.
If you want to see more from me: Check out my video on this month of Game Pass games: https://youtu.be/tgNS9djM5ak
ya hay que ser cabrón para no meterme una guerra civil en el último acto
I had high hopes going into the first little bit of this! I thought:
- Ooooh I can make my PC
- OOOOOH I can make a lady PC
- Oooh base building kinda sorta
But then it kinda lost me--I just didn't feel the spark. I wish I had more interesting things to say but I just didn't feel it, y'know? I was looking for X-Com Rome and I got not really that.
- Ooooh I can make my PC
- OOOOOH I can make a lady PC
- Oooh base building kinda sorta
But then it kinda lost me--I just didn't feel the spark. I wish I had more interesting things to say but I just didn't feel it, y'know? I was looking for X-Com Rome and I got not really that.
Хорошая игра, с интересным выбором и последствиями
History of the game is very interesting and it reflects this well, but I couldn't finish it even though I started from the beginning twice. The gameplay is too repetitive. This gets incredibly boring towards the last chapters. Doing the same things over and over again from the beginning to the end feels very painful and causes you to break away from the story. Not a bad game but not a good game. It gets incredibly unbalanced in difficulty most of the time. They definitely needed to keep this game shorter and deepened the main story as well. The way they chose to prolong the gameplay ruined the game. I'm probably done with this game for good. I tried my best to love it and finish it, but the game doesn't want that to happen.
RPG de boa história, varias mecânicas de progressão e com bons finais, e um combate que mescla estratégia e montagem de time. Vale por tudo que entrega.
This review contains spoilers
honestly i think my lil 2015 lenovo laptop is on its last legs bc it's not good enough to run this game. but that's besides the point. i think the camp-building + rpg character development + turn-based strategy battle elements were really interesting but it kinda got overwhelming.
gonna be honest when caesar died 10 secs in i was about to uninstall lmfao. but then i realized....i'm caesar now. all of the subsequent roman rulers will henceforth be known as sams. for that, 3.5 stars.
also lucullus kinda hot too bad my character only saw him as a father figure 😬
gonna be honest when caesar died 10 secs in i was about to uninstall lmfao. but then i realized....i'm caesar now. all of the subsequent roman rulers will henceforth be known as sams. for that, 3.5 stars.
also lucullus kinda hot too bad my character only saw him as a father figure 😬
Really fun turn-based combat missions and I enjoyed getting to know my party members. However, eventually I grew tired of the random encounters on the world map and having to battle with my legion to conquer new areas. It got too repetitive. I was also disappointed that the game forces you to do certain combat missions with some random characters instead of your own party.
Engaging CRTS and I enjoyed my time with it, not my style of game but was fun. Shelved one the big February games came out. Was hard to keep track of all the names in the story, and the overworld cycle got repetitive by the time you get to Act 2.
I am finishing up a few games I had going in anticipation of Elden Ring's launch. I think you will enjoy this title quite a bit if you are interested in classics. The way it plays with and cleverly references real historical touchstones while subverting the facts and letting you play your own character is brilliant. The dialogue is delightful throughout and I grew attached to the main supporting cast. This would have been a solid 4 stars for me, but the combat and military tactics portions of the game grew VERY repetitive. The last 1/3 of the game was a bit of a slog for me. Ultimately I'd say check this out if you are also a classics nerd.