Never Second in Rome

Buy it!

This is one of those games that is aimed at those with specific interests and you either hate or love. Personally I found it pretty fun managing myself and my army. That said I'm not a big fan of how you get to custom create what kind of talent you discover in your squad. I would much prefer if you discovered randomly generated talents that you did your best to utilize instead of choosing yourself what talent your squad have. Be ready to read tooltips and take your time understanding how things work the first couple hours. otherwise you are gonna struggle.

If you like strategic games with interesting combat mechanics and troop management, this is the game for you! It's mostly text based and the number crunching can feel a little intimidating, but I pretty quickly got a feel for it and didn't need to get bogged down in the math. However, if you like to get bogged down in the math, it's all there for you to sink your teeth into! I finished my first play through in ~30 hours and after the recent update I'm starting my second playthrough and am definitely looking forward to it!

I liked the previous version of the game, however this one is quite underwhelming. I don't enjoy it, and I would suggest you skip it. The first game was fairly punchy, and while the combat system was somewhat strange, the combat was just a part of what was sort of a visual novel and a narrative experience combined with the combat system. You could get through a run in a few hours, and could quickly iterate on what builds worked well. This game is much longer, but not in a good way. There are extended combat sequences that are uninteresting, and multiple fights chained together. There are now formation battles which I find quite underwhelming. The story has bloated significantly. The game is broken into chunks. It seemed cool and promising - manage a Roman soldier's life from the start to the finish. Given how much combat there is now, the fact that it's so incredibly slow (Yes I enabled all the speedup options) both in the individual combat and the formation combat is quite unfortunate. The developer seems to have felt that the first game was too easy (it wasn't), and has decided to make the combat much more grueling. This spike in difficulty meant there was really only one viable build, which the developer promptly nerfed in a patch. Okay, the dev wants this game to be dark souls, and I just need to skill up, right? Nah, this is a multi hour slog, where I can't make meaningful build choices, I also can't make meaningful choices during combat, and I can't make meaningful choices during the formation combat. Same with the training. Each one feels like a puzzle, and because of the desire for high difficulty, and limited mechanics in each module, there's really only one solution. The story is very bland and something about the scope and scale of it - somehow with the increased amount of it, the story becomes a drag, and there's not a great way to speed it up, so there's just a ton of downtime between the uninteresting fights. Sid Meier defined a game as "a series of interesting choices" and after 5 hours I can tell you that none of the choices in the various modes (training, individual combat, formation combat, and the narrative decisions) are interesting to me. The pacing is rough, and the difficulty is completely out of whack with such an overall uninteresting game. When you make something really challenging, and it's not very exciting, it feels more fiddly and demanding than creating an impression of "yeah this is like Dark Souls!"

I like the historical aspects of this game. The RNG continues to be just as broken as the first game by this dev. +48 to win? Sure let's get 7 hard pressed in a row and ruin my stamina with no damage to the opponent. It happens far too often to be random. About 5 minutes after I wrote this: opponent checked a +30 +35 +37 all in a row. 1.7% chance. And yet...over and over and over and over and over and over again, no matter how much more skilled my guy is.

This game does an amazing job at getting me immersed into the setting. It is very text heavy and best described as an interactive history book. It is best taken slow and carefully planned, the training segments are the most impactful to your future success or failure. Replaying the game has been very fun as I am able to prioritize my training with better knowledge of what's to come. It has allowed me to clear once difficult chapters with a mew found ease. I found this game due to playing the creator previous game a legionary's life, I loved that games meta progression and had only bought this game due to finding out something similar had been added to it's iron man mode, but now after playing a full campaign and being on my second I have found a great appreciation for the fact that this game was not built around meta progression. It instead rewards careful planning. I am doing great on my second run compared to my first and it is not due to some initial boost but rather my knowledge. I highly recommend this game it has been a joy to play and I see myself coming back to it multiple times just as I did with A Legionary's Life.

Great trip through middle-Roman history from a unique perspective, with an engaging tactical-sim game to boot.