Ave, Legate! If You’re Looking For an Excellent Strategy RPG, Look No Further Than Expeditions: Rome.
With its historical might and (in)famy, it is far from a surprise that many people look to the glory of Rome when they need inspiration. And while it might be easy, relatively speaking, to simply create a grand, large scale strategy game, ala Risk, or perhaps put the player into the sandals of a small time soldier looking for glory, Logic Artist’s Expeditions: Rome takes an interesting approach: it takes its shot at both.
To be more specific, Expeditions: Rome is an interesting mix of turn based RPG and management strategy. Half of the game consists of familiar, hex based combat with individual units, designated as your Praetorians. The other half consists of managing your legion and its conquests. Before going more into detail about the mechanics, however, I think the story should be covered first. This is an RPG after all.
Expeditions: Rome takes you across three major conquests, those being set in Asia Minor, North Africa, and Gaul. However, before you trample all enemies of Rome beneath your feet, you escape Rome herself due to the murder of your father. Your mother has you sent to the war camp of Lucius Licinius Lucullus, a friend of your father and the current leader of a Roman force sent to stop a rebellion in Greece.
While at this camp, Lucullus understands your potential and your skill, and is quick to set you up with a few missions and a set of comrades with which to prove your worth. And prove your worth you do, as your initial exploits set you up with a legion of your very own, alongside an important mission: bring Asia Minor back under Roman control.
From there, you are given free reign to conduct your conquest as you see fit, with the game itself imposing no time limit on your overall quest. After all, as one of the loading splash tips helpfully reminds you: war can take years. There’s no need to rush your campaign, so long as you hopefully don’t translate in game time to real time. Even for an intricate game like this, taking years to play it is a bit much!
As far as story plots go, I would say that Expeditions: Rome’s isn’t anything particularly out there. It is simple enough, the story of a young person with potential growing into the hero they were always meant to be. There’s nothing wrong with that kind of story, of course, and I found myself enjoying this one greatly. Not to mention that the voice acting sounded amazing, and definitely added to the depth of some of the more plot important characters, as simply having a literal voice to latch on to does wonders.
Leaning down into the more personal aspects of things, as is typical of all RPGs, Expeditions: Rome features a multitude of sidequests for you to track down and solve, as what better way to manage your exploits than to go down into the weeds and solve them yourself?
Among the sidequests littered around are some that feature your previously mentioned set of comrades. These are special characters, with you from the beginning, that are familiar and dependable faces who wage war at your side. These characters have sidequests of their own, which you can (and likely should!) partake in, so that you can understand and respect them better. There is a big issue I have with your set of special comrades, but for now, I’ll just say to keep them in mind as we dive into some of the mechanics of the game.
Mechanically, as mentioned prior, Expeditions: Rome has two parts: the RPG and the strategy. In the RPG sections, you are controlling a handful of units on a hex based grid, taking turns with the enemies and the occasional neutral or allied NPC. In the strategy sections, you are managing your legion, traversing the world map, initiating attacks, and defending yourself from enemy assaults.
I personally found the flexibility refreshing. While you might not exactly be able to shift from RPG to strategy and back again at the drop of a hat, Expeditions: Rome lets you know where to go to facilitate these RPG portions and gives you all the time in the world to manage your strategy. All of the strategy sections made me feel as though I was actually in control of how the conquest took place, and I rarely ever felt like I was ‘wasting time’.
Expeditions: Rome also gives you a war camp for further management, which allows you to create buildings to replenish your supplies, craft stratagems, and items, and heal your wounded troops. The ‘resources’ for creating and upgrading these buildings were large things like farms and tanneries that must be brought under your control on the world map, which I thought was incredibly fun. The implicit sense of scale that brings to the table was enough to make me double take when I first thought about it.
That being said, there were occasions that I thought took a bit too long, as even with all of the things to do, there were moments, particularly in the on-foot party sections, where I was sitting around waiting for my character to traverse a section of the map I had already been in multiple times prior. That, coupled with my minor gripe that I couldn’t pull the camera up very high above the ground, sometimes made completing certain sidequests a chore.
There were also the battles between legions themselves, which were done on an abstract scale, with battle attrition representing combat deaths, as well as attacks and defenses launched by both sides. There were options to use stratagems at certain key points in each battle, which could affect anything from your legion’s manpower, to their morale, to how many of your soldiers go missing, to the loot you acquire. While these battles were an incredible spectacle to watch completely at first, eventually I found myself skipping the extended animations to simply pick my stratagems and get on with the game.
And now… for one of my major gripes with Expeditions: Rome. As an RPG, naturally, it has a party and leveling system. And, as per RPG standard, to fill a party, you need party members. Starting out, you receive yourself as a unit, again as typical of RPGs, as well as a small cohort of named and notable NPCs.
However, you also receive the ability to hire additional praetorians, both to fill your party and to staff your war camp’s various stations. The problem with this is that in addition to the fact that there are technically only four ‘classes’ for playable units to be, the additional praetorians are also randomly generated, giving them a set of traits, a class, and a disposition, with no development past that.
The issue that I found with this is that the personal, intricate character aspect of RPGs gets lost in this manner. I found it hard at times to focus on my handful of notable trusted companions with deeper backstory, due to the fact that my party was frequently required to be filled with non story related allies. In addition, past the occasional plot mission, you do not even need to bring your trusted companions in many of the missions Expeditions: Rome throws at you, further losing their importance amid a sea of other various praetorians.
This is not to say that the RPG sections of Expeditions: Rome are bad! The combat feels great, and the classes are vastly more flexible and customizable than they first appear, meaning that even among the ‘generic’ allies you hire on, many of them will play wildly differently from each other.
In my opinion, though, that only further depersonalizes a lot of the RPG’s personality! The fact that you only have a handful of ‘plot important’ characters means that they can easily get drowned out, especially due to the fact that having these ‘non important’ allies is required to succeed in all of the missions after their introduction as a mechanic.
That being said, I would say that that is one of the very few things that actually hurt my experience with Expeditions: Rome. I adored the blend of RPG and strategy, and though I’m admittedly not much of a history nut, I found everything about how the game presented its subject matter to be incredibly appealing. Not to mention that the art was gorgeous, and I need to bring up the voice acting again because it was great, and really added a layer of polish to an already very smooth gameplay experience.
If you’re looking for an intricate game that artfully intertwines RPG and strategy, then look no further than Expeditions: Rome. Also make sure to check out Logic Artists on Steam to see their other games, or check out the publisher, THQ Nordic!
If you’re not looking for something like Expeditions: Rome… then perhaps take a look at other articles here on GamesCreed! A good place to start would be our list of 2021 GOTY Nominees!
