I won’t pretend it’s as much fun as Troy, Three Kingdoms, Total Hamwarmer 2, or any of my current go-to Total Wars, because there is, to put it bluntly, less of it. The sheer emptiness around this rural settlement looks weirdly serene, for all its eerieness. I'm not kidding when I say the battle maps can look a little sparse. But as I found out when I reviewed it, Praetorians has aged about as well as a plate of raw chicken left out of the fridge in summer. It was great fun when it was released, just a few months before Rome: Total War in 2003. Just look at that other remastered Rome-’em-up, Praetorians. All too often, an HD glow-up of a strategy game’s visuals only emphasises how dated the rest of it is. Still, times change, and so does game design. And indeed you were right, for it was excellent. “Surely that would be a good thing,” you pronounce, for you played Rome in 2004, and you found it to be excellent. I expected that little would have been changed about the game, except “Total War” and “Rome” switching sides of the infamous Total War colon, and the usual GLORIOUS HD which tends to headline any strategy remaster. I’ll admit this coloured my expectations a little. This remaster, I suppose, was a logical next step from that, and it’s actually Feral’s first game made for Windows.

They’ve done a lot of Total Wars over the years, and even put Rome on android back in 2018, to a largely favourable reaction from players. TW:RR has been developed by Feral Interactive, best known for making Mac and Linux ports of blockbuster games. The default felt a little crowded for me, but there are scaling options. both? This is the new UI, as it appears on the campaign map. The answer I eventually arrived at, and which will take a bit of explaining, is. I’ve definitely enjoyed a few days of Roming it up, but it's been hard to put my finger on whether this feels like a solid nostalgia piece, or a new, weirdly unambitious entry in the series. The result, released today, is a remaster of 2004’s Rome: Total War called. It’s interesting, then, that the celebrated manbattling series has at last succumbed to the wave of remasters sweeping the strategy genre, and taken a rummage in the back catalogue. And though there have been missteps from time to time, it’s hard to disagree that the general trend in quality has been positive. Even so, the formula has been tweaked here and there, with every one of the nine and a half million Total War games released since Shogun in 2000.

Rome total war starting map