Warlord: Britannia

[h1] My Experience [/h1] In Warlord: Britannia, you command a Roman Legion during an invasion of, well, Britannia. The game is actually fairly simple and straightforward but is still an odd mix of genres and elements. There's some tactics and strategy involved, some army management, some basebuilding, and some first person action. It's something I still kind of struggle to boil down. Ultimately the best thing I came up with is that WL:B is pretty much "Baby Mount & Blade" in the same way I'd call Ravenfield "Baby Arma 3." No insult intended, I believe the simplicity of the game is actually a strong point. Right from the start, you can tell visuals and sounds are not really this game's strong suit. The models are simple rectangles with balls for heads. They look like if you took the pawns from Prison Architect or Rimworld and turned them into 3D. Conquering settlements is a simple matter of eliminating all defending enemies. Once that is done a pop-up window appears with several options. You can loot or enslave -in degrees- the settlement which will rile up the population but earn you a good amount of money and resources in the short term. You can also choose to tax/extract instead, which can give you a decent but reliable income of money and resources. The options make it a bit interesting, and different types of settlements such as farms will be better for extraction rather than taxation, but in reality you would only want to do loot/enslave in the very early game for emergency resources or later on to finish quests/get achievements. The unrest of conquered settlements and sometimes even hostile ones is also something you have to be careful and watch out for, as high unrest can lead to ambushes on your marching force or surprise attacks on your camp. And the aforementioned revolts and raids. One of the first things the game instructs you to do is to set up your home base. You basically put down a hidden banner and that's designated as your home base. You can build tents as living quarters, various forms of storage, and some walls, battlements and towers for defence. But the biggest and most surprising thing was that everything you place down in your home base actually gets saved into a preset. With a couple clicks in the camp menu, you can form up your legion, pack up your home base and move it elsewhere. This kind of "Nomadic" home base is unique to this game and is important as you move up further inland, not only that but you should take care not to camp near roads or settlements as it means its more likely for enemies to run into the camp. When it comes to your Legion, we start with recruitment. It costs gold, varying depending on what type of soldier you're recruiting. Each soldier needs living space and will take up a daily cost of food, supplies and silver. Soldiers can be assigned to standby for the call to arms, to guard duty, or as workers to help build the camp or cut down trees for timber. Food/supplies shortage can affect factors such as health, damage and ammunition, while surplus provides a buff. When you have your troops ready, you press a button in the Legion tab that calls up everyone to prepare for battle. This opens up a set of simple but fun controls and command. At the most essential level, you can set your units to follow a marching, battle or testudo formmation and they will organize accordingly depending on how many units you have and their types. Every formation also has sub-types, such as 1 column or 2 column marches, 3 rows or 2 rows battle/testudo, and so on. Some additional commands such as enabling/disabling ranged attacks and torches at night are also available, providing just a little extra level of control. Call me cruel but one of my favorite things to do is to sneak up on a settlement just enough until my artillery is in range to begin bombarding it. While for the most part it's nothing advanced, it's simple and accessible fun that gives you just the right amount of control over your forces in battle. With the way you have to slowly expand your camp and legion, there's a very strong and solid sense of gradual progression which I greatly desire from games like this and absolutely love to see. There is nothing quite like seeing how big and experienced your legion has become and the battles they participate in becoming so massive. For as much as I've praised the game, I do have to admit it has a number of flaws, mainly in some ideas feeling undercooked or unexplored and a lack of QoL in some places. These types of games can get repetitive after a while. I'm writing my review after conquering the lowlands which is only one third of the world because I feel I had seen almost everything the game has to offer for me. Though I feel this is just a sort of "cursed" game design problem that comes packaged with these types of games. Like I mentioned, when I first played it on my old laptop I had some performance issues and the game didn't click with me initially. Even now with my new, much more powerful laptop I still ran into some unstable and lower frames but no freezing except for when saving the game. I'm not a technical guy, but I have a feeling it's due to some fundamental functions of the game not being quite optimized despite its simple appearance. Officer ranks just prove extra health, damage and "luck" AFAIR to that specific soldier. For how expensive they are to upkeep and promote to those positions in the first place they can feel kind of useless outside of being a stronger soldier. Signifiers and Cornicens are worst offenders of this, since they basically sit in their designated formation spot while everyone else fights around them. I wish the Officers actually had more additional or unique benefits to their unit or even the legion at large to justify their costs so they're not just a slot to fill. In the early game it feels nice to single out soldiers for promotions and upgrades, but later in the game it can get tedious and more often than not I wish there was some sort of automatic backfill for ranks and topping up units when they come back from a battle with casulties. Likewise for upgrades or at least an option to filter out who has which level of armor instead of having to manually look through every tiny dot on the legion tab and read what type of armor they have before choosing to upgrade or not. The management UI can be unclear in places, and I believe that's largely due to the map being forced to take up half the screen while the UI scaling option doesn't help with enlarging icons or things I actually need to be able to read at a glance. The map should be seperated, while something like the Legion tab should be reworked to be zoomable on specific units like Shadow of Mordor/War or easily filtered/sorted somehow. [h2] Conclusion [/h2] Ultimately, I still recommend this game. I know I did highlight a bunch of negatives about the game but it should show you how much I enjoyed it and had a great time with that I'm still willing to recommend it despite its flaws. Then again, I may be a little biased because I'm exactly the kind of guy that enjoys this kind of light strategy and action blend, and also just so happens to be able to stomach a lot of negatives and see it through. There are good ideas here, with simple but satisfactory execution. The price can be a bit steep considering the flaws so I can understand any apprehension towards buying it off sale. If the idea of the game interests you, but the flaws put you off, then at the very least I do advise you to keep an eye out on Darkmatter Games' upcoming sequel of sorts - Warlord: Awaji. This review had to be shortened due to Steam's character limit [url=https://mhmdcrnr.wordpress.com/2026/07/16/warlord-britannia-review/]Full Review Here.[/url] [i]Please remember to check other reviews to make a properly informed decision about purchasing this game. I am but one man speaking from my own experience and with my own preferences.[/i]