It took dozens of hours, and at least a dozen more, but I finally did it. For Robertus Aetherius Summings, I had built a digital legacy worthy of the glory (and tsundere imperialistic right) of Rome. I organized an elite army to conquer Asia Minor, North Africa, and Gaul, besieging cities, defeating corrupt senators, assassinating enemies with my wild bunch of praetorians, and especially impressing a horny and hubristic Cleopatra with my arrogance.

It would be a solid resume for any aspiring ancient Roman regent.

Exploration: Expeditions: Rome is a historical RPG that appropriates elements from campaign maps like Total War and games like Divinity: a CRPG-style overworld adventure with tactical turn-based combat. It is a historical RPG that appropriates elements from games like Divinity: Original Sin into an adventure that spans the vast reaches of the classical world.

The similarities to "Divinity" are no coincidence. Developer Logic Artists' previous historical RPGs, Viking and Conquistador, impressed Larian Studios enough to take on the co-development of Divinity: Fallen Heroes. but that project was interrupted (presumably for the development of Baldur's Gate 3). In short, this developer is no commoner when it comes to this type of game.

Expeditions: Rome smoothes out the labor-intensive aspects that characterize RPGs. Instead of fiddling with attributes and secondary skills, leveling up involves upgrading just one skill for that character, and junk items can be broken down directly into crafted parts so you don't have to spend hours selling them off to various merchants. 70+ hours of this game is long enough without having to manage the details.

A few companions join the quest, including a former gladiator, a philosopher warrior with an embarrassing past, and a female scout who gives up after a few hours of a particularly unconvincing "hooded, slightly gruff-voiced impersonation of a young man" act. There is enough banter between them to curry favor with your crew, and the possibility of their death or injury means that you need to recruit spare praise soldiers at your encampment, as if "Football Manager 50BC" or "Procurator Pediludium 704 Ab" (Latin scholars, please leave corrections in the comments), you can substitute them as if you were playing "Pediludium 704 Ab".

However, the side quests related to them, like most side quests in this game, are like barely sticking jam on the edge of an overstuffed sandwich and struggle to squeeze them in around the main storyline. Also, your companions don't seem to be particularly affected by your actions. Despite the constant feed of conciliatory/arrogant/stoic/sexist characters approving or disapproving of the important decisions you make, I experienced no repercussions or consequences throughout the game.

To be fair, when you have to manage an entire Roman legion, there is little time to get along with your peers. As a member of a respected Roman family under threat from a powerful senator who plots his own extinction, you are sent into the Roman army to retake Asia Minor (the fact that you are sent to war "for your own safety" shows how temperamental high-level Roman politics (The fact that you are sent to war for "personal safety" shows how high level Roman politics can be temperamental). Eventually you prove yourself in battle, rising to the position of legate, commanding a Roman legion of several thousand men while carrying out covert missions such as assassinations, sabotaging enemy supply lines, and exposing corruption in the rival Roman clans that want your head.

The majority of the game takes place on the overworld map, from which you can send your praetorian party and army on missions around the country. Armies can attack and defend cities, and resources such as lumberyards, mines, and farms can be procured and used to upgrade encampments. The recruitment of new praetorians and military commanders in the barracks, the forging of weapons and armor in the forge, and even the construction of bathhouses could steadily boost the morale of the legion by stationing praetorians with "social" characteristics (I am not sure if chatting with soldiers naked in the bathhouse was really a resident role in the Roman legion, but it was a valuable role in my legion). (I don't know if chatting with soldiers naked in the baths was really a resident in the Roman legion, but it was a valuable role in my legion).

Along with the main quest that you carry out with the praetorians, each act requires you to occupy a certain part of the map with the legion in order to progress the story. The combat system of the corps has some interesting quirks, such as choosing the commander of the battle and using strategy cards to determine the actions of your army, but once you realize that it is just a numbers game (I never lost a battle), instead of watching your blue square collide with the red square of the enemy, it auto-resolves I end up doing it. It's a sad fate for a potentially fascinating layer.

Most of your play time will be spent with a party of praetorians exploring the city, chatting with NPCs, and engaging in turn-based combat; with a touch of CRPG, you'll encounter random text-based events as you traverse the overworld map. You sample the dubious food offered by a Berber woman in a carpeted hut, decide what to do with a corpse you've stumbled upon, or decide how drunk you want to get on the wine at night in camp. These events are wonderfully written, and the overlap between superstition and reality in many of them is appropriate for a time when magic was still widely used as an explanation for secular phenomena.

In turn-based combat, they utilize lairs in the environment, secure high ground for their archers, and attempt to funnel and flank the enemy into submission. There are no initiative stats here, so you can do a partial turn with one character, switch to another, and then back to the previous character. It is also possible to execute that character's turn while another character is still moving around the map, which gives a nice fluidity to the progression.

It is infinitely satisfying to throw caltrops at the enemy to make them pathfind and enter the death field watched by the archer, or to shower an Egyptian pharaoh and his elite guards with poison and firebombs before surrounding them with troops and striking them with attacks of opportunity as they try to escape.

By the gods, however, the battle can be protracted. They are almost always outnumbered, perhaps to give a sense of grandeur and intensity to the city sieges and ambushes by Gallic warriors at the end of the chapter. However, the sheer number of units makes it too time-consuming to watch over enemy and friendly units, and even civilians' turns (especially frustrating when the friendly AI makes pointless moves like running through fire to finish off a neutralized enemy).

Thankfully, I discovered after about 50 hours of play that I could increase the turn speed, but even then some sieges could take half a day to complete. Turn-based combat is fine, but it suffers on this scale. At the end of each turn, I would spend about 70 seconds watching 15 or 20 units zigzag around a hex-based battlefield. It makes you aware that the combat is synthetic and pulls you away from the action.

This could have been offset if the game offered a little more RPG-like freedom--for example, the ability to get out of situations by stealth or sweet-talking. Characters have personality traits that circumvent some combat scenarios, but the game really wants you to fight. However, in the later stages, the irrelevant 30 minutes of combat triggered by random events on the overworld map just feels like a waste of time.

And speaking of wasting time, I ran into a number of situations where I had to have certain characters available for a mission, but could not do the mission because one of them was injured in a random event and was in the infirmary at the encampment. With no side quests, too often I let a day or two of in-game time pass before they recovered, brought them back from the infirmary, and then went back to what I was doing. Combining this with the combat could have cut the length of the game by about 12 hours.

Expeditions: Where Rome really shines is in its attention to historical detail. While most of the environments are not particularly interactive, a flexible overhead camera allows you to zoom in and admire the patterned wall and floor tiles of a Roman villa, the vibrant rugs adorning a Berber war tent, and the paintings and hieroglyphics on an Egyptian tomb where a rogue Roman legion is hiding out. Meanwhile, the weapons and armor all have Latin names, which can only be considered historically faithful designs (they look beautiful, in any case).

The game offers an epic story of war and politics while familiarizing you with the honorifics, customs, weapons, and even food of the inhabitants of the ancient world.

This historical slant and the journey across three different regions of the ancient world make this game a worthwhile exploration, especially if you are interested in this period. However, like the Pope, you will need to be stoic in the face of friction along the way.