Hmm. Well, After getting a couple of days with the game the jury is out. i'm afraid to say. This pains me no end because of two things: I'm a massive Roman history nerd and I love Paradox games.
For the half dozen people on the forum who might have ever thought about buying it, go ahead. It's fun enough in places but, well, I don't really no where to start. Actually, I do: here goes my review.
Firstly, I suspect they should probably change the title from Europa Universalis: Rome to Europa Universalis: Generic ancient nation #1. This is a problem I thought they may well have had. The problem with doing a game about Rome and doing it justice is that you have to tailor the system to Rome rather than the host of Hellenistic and successor kingdoms kicking around the Med.
What made Rome great, particularly in the days of the Republic, are the fact that they were noticeably different in terms of government, in warfare and the raising of armies, in citizen ship and society. Paradox has decided to almost completely ignore anything that could be described as uniquely Roman in favour of a fairly weak system that actually leaves RTW looking like a master class in grand strategy. Cases in point? here goes:
Consuls: In reality two were elected to rule for a year. In the game one is elected to rule for two years. Coupled to the fact that, in the game, Consuls seem to win re-election every year until they either die or get caught up in some sort of scandal which destroys their popularity and you have something which is indistinguishable from a monarch - exactly and categorically the opposite of what the Roman republican system was created to provide.
Campaign season. Now this one is just bizarre considering that in almost every game I have ever played the time of year and the weather has a major effect in combat. In the ancient world military campaigns were fought predominantly from march through to October or so. In Eu:Rome none of this matters, you can fight as long as you want, start a campaign in the middle of winter and neither weather nor terrain will have the slightest impact on how things will play out.
Women: My various governorships and magistrates posts are mostly being held by woman now because, you know, Cleopatra in HBO's Rome was quite ballsy and strong so, you know, that must have been what it was like in real life...
Granted, women in Rome had more emancipation that is commonly remembered nowadays but I deny anyone to show me a single instance where a woman was ever elected Questor, Praetor of Pontifex Maximus....
Ah, you know what? I'm going to leave it there. I won't even mention the endless and silly barbarian migrations, the stupidly inconsequential battles, the utter lack of anything resembling the historical accuracy and depth that Paradox are famous for because I'm already feeling like I got cheated out of my cash. There are a lot of things I have not even bothered mentioning because they could simply be bugs. They can't even put the little icon of Rome on the correct side of the Tiber for God's sake.
The main problem is that bugs can get fixed but the real issue is that the implemented features (or lack of them,) are not very good. They may mostly Work as designed but, in this case, that is saying next to nothing. It feels like a really cheap attempt to cash in on the ROME tv series than make a decent in depth and captivating game. I suspect that it will do well enough but I also suspect it will lose them an awful lot of fans as well.
Don't mind me, I'm just bitter. but so are an awful lot of people. Not that you will ever find out, though, because the Paradox forum is so bad it crashes when more than three people are on it at once. Handy way of avoiding all the complaints.
3 out of 10. If you want an interesting and historically viable game set in the classical era stick with RTW with mods.
None of you know how much it pains me to say that. None of you...
