Rome: Total War - Gold Edition App Reviews

I find this game completely immersive and thought out beautifully. There are some bugs, but this isnt the newest of games so what do you except. Multiplayer is a pain. You can only use lan for the mac.

I’ve been a devoted fan of the Total War franchise since the original Shogun, but switched to the Mac about six years ago. I was absolutely thrilled when Feral released Rome Total War for the App Store and have been playing it religiously since (and note that Medieval 2 Total War is also now available!). I downloaded the game in about 25 minutes and started it right up with no problem. Back in 2004, I was running this game on a powerful “gaming laptop”, but even then it was slower on High graphics settings. Surprisingly, I can run the game on my new 2015 MacBook 12inch at MAX settings, with no noticeable lag at all. Amazing! As for a review of the game itself, if you are a fan of ancient history and fantasize about the clash of swords and armor, Roman legions in marching in formation, catapults hurling flaming pitch, truly massive armies and siege battles, and enjoy a grand strategy game, then look no farther than this. RTW (and it’s brother, M2TW) are epic in scope, fun to play, and challenging enough to keep you playing, but not so hard you get frustrated and want to give up. A word of warning: These games are majorly time-consuming….plan on spending a least 1-2 hours per gaming session, and, as is often the case for me, find yourself saying “just one more turn...” at 2am! You’ll notice I didn’t mention the newer Total War games, Rome 2, Empire, Shogun 2, etc. As great as those games are (and they truly are fantastic), for me, the original TW games are the best, despite their relative age. The battles are mind-blowing HUGE with no lag, and the campaign map game balance is just the right blend of tactical real-time combat with sweeping, massive scale strategy. In many ways, these games feel like good old fashion chess, but with little armies being moved about a virtual map; better yet, you can then zoom down and direct each cohort and legion as you smash your way to victory!

I can’t belive that I still playing this game. This game is the best game ever made. I have played this game so much that if the totla amouth of hours that I have spen in this game is equal to 8,760 hours I wont be surprice. This is the best game ever made, period. I have played this game like 7 times since I bought it. and each time equal to 4 moths of pure, nonstop playing time. If you have an old hardware then this game is perfect since it was made in 2004 and it should not be too demanding in all the recent macs.

It is not that well thought out. Many of the navigational directions given in the tutorial are for microsoft keyboards and don’t pertain and/or don’t work. You can progress by fighting battles in a compaign. You build infrastructure and you build troops but although you are given controls to manipulate these, they don’t fully work. The game does what it wants to do and ignores your input. At some point in a campaign you cannot create more troops or infrastructure, the game just goes to sleep on this and you cannot win. There is little “intelligence” given about your opponent. You approach a battle with no idea of your own strength or your opponent. For example, you try to move two of your warships into battle, and although they are large warships, the game tells you too late that you have only 25 men total on board, an unbelievably small crew, while your opponent has hundreds of crew and show up from nowhere seemingly. Like so many Apple products this seems an unfinished translation. It does not hold a candle to some of the war games/strategy games that you could find on microsoft computers 20 years ago. On the plus side, it did not crash and is visually interesting. But it is over 4mb in size and takes a long time to download. I am a computer systems programmer by trade and I was just not impressed with this game. I scratch my head and wonder why others give it such rave reviews. I suspect insiders wrote the rave reviews. You work from a map in a campaign. You conquer towns on the map. The towns have tedious menus to build troops, buildings and retrain/reenforce existing troops. But mostly the game does not let you build and add troops quickly, if at all, as you move from turn to turn. Many controls don’t work. You are given advice to build a type builing or infrastructure but the game will not let you do it. At one point I built an “Army”, a pitiful 800 men is an “Army”, and it flat disappeared. Conquered and built up towns which are well within your zone of control, even near Rome, somehow after many turns are subject to revolt for some reason and you may have to break off what you are doing and spend much time and effort retaking a town you already own. Enemy armies appear out of nowhere and attack your towns. The armies you create are limited to small size for some reason. It is hard to overwelm an enemy army. If you fight a hard battle you may not be able to reenforce, retrain your battered army. The game often does not let you repair your army or your town. The game is just tedious to play. It takes too much time wrestling with poor menu navigation to get things done. I thought it was NOT play. It was tedious work with too many random fails and glitches.

this is a fun game that allows you to do what you want to do.