Rome II Total War is after all the hype, bluster and PR campaigns of Sega a huge disappointment. Fundamentally flawed, unfinished, broken and a not only a terrible sequel to Rome Total War but a terrible game which has damaged the Total War IP.
On the unfinished and broken points. The game is unoptimised as hell, it has stack full of performance issues across all ranges of hardware including framerate, crashes, glitches and visual failures. Both battle and campaign AI barely function.
The game needed by all accounts at least another 6 months of development for the game to be released in a playable condition.
On the gameplay aspects looking at the real time battles. They have become easy on the verge of pointlessness. Capture points now are no longer restricted to seige battles. Battles have descended into 'rush the point' where it essentially is an auto-win feature. This is before you take into account the battle ai which when functioning during normal battles rushes you in a blob making it easy even on higher difficulties to slaughter them. Whilst on siege battles the ai is broken and literally does nothing. Historical battles have been reduced to a footnote with only 3 present and multiplayer is terrible if it actually functions.
The turn based campaign map is also worse. Family trees for some bizarre reason only known to Creative Assembly have been removed. Diplomacy doesn't work. Agents can be used to block enemy units. The campaign ai is just as bad as the battle one. The civilisations other than the Roman, Macedonian and Egyptian factions have limited building and troop options ( much less than RTW) This is before we mention that for either performance issues or just terrible design choice it usually takes 2 minutes at least for the ai to complete their turns.
On the community aspect a huge core of community interaction A.K.A modding has been incredibly restricted by CA. It has become clear now as to why. DLC. There is DLC here ladies and gents AT LAUNCH with more on the way. We know where Sega is taking this business model.
In short avoid at all costs. If I were a 'gaming journalist' I would give it 3.5/10 with the blurb 'Was not ready for release.'
On the unfinished and broken points. The game is unoptimised as hell, it has stack full of performance issues across all ranges of hardware including framerate, crashes, glitches and visual failures. Both battle and campaign AI barely function.
The game needed by all accounts at least another 6 months of development for the game to be released in a playable condition.
On the gameplay aspects looking at the real time battles. They have become easy on the verge of pointlessness. Capture points now are no longer restricted to seige battles. Battles have descended into 'rush the point' where it essentially is an auto-win feature. This is before you take into account the battle ai which when functioning during normal battles rushes you in a blob making it easy even on higher difficulties to slaughter them. Whilst on siege battles the ai is broken and literally does nothing. Historical battles have been reduced to a footnote with only 3 present and multiplayer is terrible if it actually functions.
The turn based campaign map is also worse. Family trees for some bizarre reason only known to Creative Assembly have been removed. Diplomacy doesn't work. Agents can be used to block enemy units. The campaign ai is just as bad as the battle one. The civilisations other than the Roman, Macedonian and Egyptian factions have limited building and troop options ( much less than RTW) This is before we mention that for either performance issues or just terrible design choice it usually takes 2 minutes at least for the ai to complete their turns.
On the community aspect a huge core of community interaction A.K.A modding has been incredibly restricted by CA. It has become clear now as to why. DLC. There is DLC here ladies and gents AT LAUNCH with more on the way. We know where Sega is taking this business model.
In short avoid at all costs. If I were a 'gaming journalist' I would give it 3.5/10 with the blurb 'Was not ready for release.'