But what I really love about Troy is that, more than any other Total War to date, it doesn't rely on those self-made objectives. Seeking out and seizing the places they can be found is an adventure in itself, and provides plenty of fodder for the sort of self-made objectives that big, long strategy games thrive on. Those poor, doomed bastards.īut the good ol' truth-behind-the-myth units, which reveal 90% of legendary creatures to have been either very angry women, or very large men who like wearing animal skulls, are great. Walls, it turns out, were a really neat way of keeping people out of cities, and the best way of getting past them is still either overwhelming swarms of spear lads and autoresolves, or patience on the campaign map. But that depth tends to evaporate once the fights are underway. They're certainly better than the ones from the Warhammer games, and the 360-degree encirclement deployments offer a hell of a lot more in the way of strategic depth. And while I don't feel particularly fair nitpicking an animation system that's impressive just for achieving combat on that scale at all, it's something that keeps being passed on, to a greater or lesser extent, to each successive game in the series.Īnother bit of unfortunate baggage, I'm afraid to say, is sieges. You know the sort of thing I mean, because you've played a Total War game. You know the sort of thing I mean - geezers getting hurled through the air when nothing touched them, or heroes leaping angrily towards groups of foes, only to slash wildly at some nearby air instead of actually swording anyone.
Possibly the only visual let-down, in fact, is the weirdness that can transpire when you zoom in to watch fights close-up.
Every detail of the game, from the black figure pottery patterns in the skybox of the gorgeous campaign map, to the stylisation of icons and UI elements, positively reeks of the semi-mythical setting. Visually and atmospherically, it's spot-on.
TOTAL WAR SAGA REVIEW FULL
To give full credit to Creative Assembly Sofia, I reckon that if they'd made their vision of the game from the ground up, rather than retrofitting it in time to provide the latest annual iteration of what has become the FIFA of strategy, it would have been properly stellar. It's more that Troy feels like it's suffered a bit from having to be built from the bones of previous Total Wars. I don't mean that it's unpolished, although I would argue that the diplomacy and resource mechanics would benefit from a bit more QA. Unfortunately, the bronze age ko.fi accounts still seem to be very much open, and while there are some satisfying alliance politics to be enjoyed, the grifting is still rife. When I played a few hours of Troy for my preview last month, I was simultaneously delighted by the strategic depth of the new resource system, and a bit irritated by the AI's constant begging via diplomacy. And the helmet has been put on in a little bit of a hurry. But for all of its tweaks to the general formula, which are largely welcome, it still has the feeling of the same old soldier, wearing a different helmet. It's certainly better than Thrones Of Britannia, its predecessor in the Saga subseries. And it's a good one, for what it's worth. What I am saying, of course, is that Troy is another Total War game. But I would also wonder why, after all the time and effort it had clearly taken to make something so impressive, its makers hadn't taken another year and made it perfect. In this mythical world, I would be completely blown away by Super Iliad Guys, with its astonishing two-for-one of a cracking RTS game stacked on top of a sweeping military 4X game, and its first class, ochre-heavy art direction. Let's pretend A Total War Saga: Troy was just called Super Iliad Guys - which it should be called anyway - but had otherwise come out of the blue exactly as it is.
TOTAL WAR SAGA REVIEW SERIES
Let's pretend there was no such thing as the Total War series of games.
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