Grand Ages: Rome

I was curious to try Grand Ages: Rome, so I entered a contest to win a code for it. To my surprised, I won the contest! But, the game experience was a complete disaster from the start. The game consistently lagged and froze every few minutes, making it practically unplayable. What’s even more frustrating is that this isn’t some modern, hardware intensive release, it’s a game that’s over 15 years old. I’m running it on a laptop with an NVIDIA RTX 3050 GPU, which can handle far more demanding titles with ease, yet somehow this game brought my entire system to a standstill. It didn’t just crash the game, it froze everything. I couldn’t even open task manager to force quit it. Steam became unresponsive, and I was left with no choice but to do a hard restart on my laptop just to escape the frozen screen. It’s baffling that a game this old could cause such instability. I can't comment on the gameplay itself, because I didn’t get far enough to experience it properly since the performance issues made sure of that. I think this game seems to be completely abandoned. There haven’t been updates or fixes in years, and no signs that the developers plan to address the serious compatibility issues on modern hardware. It’s really disappointing, because if you're gonna leave it on steam for people to purchase, you should at least make sure it actually worked. With that said, I can't recommend this game at all... Unless you're running a setup from the game's original release era or feel like troubleshooting just to get a glimpse of gameplay. It's broken, outdated, and unsupported, avoid it!