The equipment of the warriors within the game, as showcased by Agamemnon here (foreground, left), is an anachronistic mess of stuff from different periods, slathered in fantasy. The game looks gorgeous, especially the black-figure aesthetic. The only game in the series that came close to the original, as far as I am concerned, was the Shogun sequel from 2011, which is arguably the best of the more recent crop of Total War games. The strategic layer was too complex for what it needed to be, and as developer Creative Assembly pumped out one game after another, the real-time battles lost whatever magic they may have had back in Shogun: Total War. With Rome: Total War (2004), the series introduced a much more detailed turn-based strategic layer, but I never felt it added anything worthwhile to the formula. It was a fairly simple yet elegant game, with evocative art and music. Released in 2000 and set during Japan’s Sengoku period, the strategic layer was a simple map, sort of like the boardgame Risk, and the real-time battles used sprites in order to render hundreds of troops. The first game in the series was Shogun: Total War. The battles themselves are real-time, with you deploying your troops before hitting the attack button, and then issuing commands to your troops in an attempt to kill off enough of the enemy so that they break and rout. When your army meets a rival army, you can choose to control the army directly on the battlefield. In case you haven’t played any of the previous entries in the series, Total War games are large-scale or “grand” strategy games where you spend most of your time playing in a turn-based layer similar to Civilization, where you build up cities to recruit bigger and better armies to conquer more cities so you can build even bigger and even better armies. The first reason is that I have come to realize that I don’t care much about the Total War games any more. There are two main reasons for why I’m done with the game and have no desire to continue playing it. I haven’t played enough of A Total War Saga: Troy (2020) to give you an honest appraisal about the game itself, or even if it’s worth your time. Let me start by saying that this is definitely not a review. This article was originally published on the defunct Ancient World Magazine website and is now re-published here.
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