Report #66

Rome: Total War is one of the oldest Total War games. I'm reviewing the original game, not the quite recent remaster of the game. Rome Total War is set in classical antiquity right around the time before the first Punic War. You can play as one of the classical empires like Rome or Carthage, or a number of "barbarians" like the Gauls. The Steam edition also includes the Barbarian Invasion expansion, but not the Alexander expansion (see the following review for this expansion).

Sometimes games just instantly click with you. Rome was such a case. Loading in the main menu, I was sure I would enjoy the game. And it was more than true. There is no question on my mind, that this is one of the best Total War games. I liked the old fashioned graphics of the strategic map, I like the epoch the game is set in and I like the fact that you can finish a campaign in 15-20 hours -- at least a short one.

The Barbarian Invasion expansion plays at the time of the migration period of the germanic tribes and the subsequent fall of West Rome. I like this historical setting a lot less than the rise of the Roman Empire and played only one single campaign. It introduces a new Horde mechanic to model the migration, which changes the gameplay for the barbaric factions drastically. I prefer the classical gameplay by far though.

There are some highly praised mods for Rome, the most prominent are probably Roma Surrectum and Europa Barbarorum. Those add more depths and historical accuracy to the game. I tried Europa Barbarorum and like it very much. It does take forever to finish a campaign however (I'm about 50 hours into a campaign and far far far from finishing it...)

Alexander is a standalone expansion for Rome Total War. It is basically a special scenario for the game. Playing as Alexander the Great, you have to recreate his conquests in 100 ingame turns. There is no variation, no choosing factions, nothing. It's not a super hard task but forces you to concentrate on conquering provinces all the time and focuses less on developing your empire. Since I like the empire building parts of Total War games, I wasn't really happy with this way of playing. Also there is almost no replay value. I did not enjoy the game as I did the vanilla version.

When the original Mafia was free on Steam in September I immediately grabbed it. Mafia is a third person action game set in America's 1930s where you follow the rise of a cab driver to the right hand of a mafia boss.

It is one of those must-play-games, that I never played before and with the giveaway I finally got a good reason to start it up. It runs surprisingly well on a modern machine, I only had 2-3 crashes and no other problems with the game on Windows 10. For a 20 year old game? Pretty great! Of course the game is ancient, the 3d-models are awful compared to more modern standards. But apart from the optics, it plays like most modern games.

I really liked the different types of cars and the different characters in the story. I think that the story could've been a bit more fleshed out at times, but overall I was invested in it and a bit sad because of the ending…getting out of crime does not pay off it seems. I liked the missions and apart from the infamous race they weren't that hard, although I had to look up a guide two times because I wasn't sure where I had to go. Overall I really enjoyed my time with the game and I'm definitely going to check out the remakes and sequels at some point. I can definitely recommend classic Mafia, as long as you don't mind playing old games.

I'm not a VN expert like many of you are. The genre is kinda hit and miss for me. However, I'm open to broaden my horizon in respect to VNs. So when I read the announcement that planetarian was going to be retired from Steam because there is a HD version available, I was curious. As you might know, I play a ton of old games, so playing an old VN is right up my alley. I was specifically interested in the original version, to not only see how one of the first VNs (correct me if I'm wrong) was, but also to see the technical side of the original game.

It was very interesting to play (or read) planetarian. I think the story takes quite some time to pick up, but in the end it delivers. The game is really simple from the gameplay and UI perspective. I would not want to play such a game all the time, but it was a cool peak in the past and I would recommend the game if you're interested in the history of video games like me. Of course the original version is not available in the Steam store anymore…

Kingdom: Classic was free on Steam a few years ago and I finally got around to playing it. From what I hear it offers a much more basic experience than its sequels and people advise to skip the Classic version altogether.

That being said, I still enjoyed the game. It has cute graphics (the reflections in the water are great!) and a simple concept, which is still entertaining. Basically you run around with your main character, collecting gold coins for recruiting people which help you defend your home and destroy 4 portals from which enemies spawn. One run takes about 2-3 hours. After that, there is not much replay value. Most of my hours were spent working on achievements. They are not specifically hard, but take some time and many restarts.

So if you're not stubborn like me and don't care about the achievements it's a nice little game for a few hours. Otherwise it gets a bit boring with time, but I still liked playing it.