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A half-baked Rome: Total War wannabe that just fails to make the grade.

Slitherine have been purveyors of fine strategy games for many years. Their game engines to date have been based around a similar concept to Rome: Total War, although establishing the whole ‘turn-based management with real-time wars’ system a long time before afore-mentioned heavyweight or its illustrious Medieval forebear entered the scene.



The fundamental difference has been that Slitherine have always had a unique combat system for the real-time element of the game. Rather than be able to control your units mid-fight, the emphasis is given to the preparation of the battle, where you can assign orders, routes, behaviours and tactics.

Thus, once you have set it all up, you have no hand in the battle at all, but just have to sit back and admire how beautifully your carefully crafted manoeuvres work out. Although immensely frustrating at the lack of control when your men gleefully gambol around the hillocks in a fashion you were not expecting, it did have a certain charm.



This latest Slitherine game makes some changes to formula, chopping some bits, yet adding others. The first to go down the pan is the management part. You now no longer have any direction or control over any area of land, but rather the campaigns consist entirely of a vast string of preset scenarios hitched together in linear fashion.

Possibly this was done so that the game could follow a historically accurate course of Roman history, but such management aspects made meaty additions to the game, and it now feels a little undercooked without them. The storyline covers countless wars from the era of Rome, developing it from a small nation into a mighty kingdom.

However, during the RTS elements that the game almost solely consists of now, your capabilities have now been upgraded so that you have a limited means of controlling your army. There is still a lot of focus on the setup, and how you compose your troops into their various positions and assign orders, but the real-time commands offer a controllable option when the action is in progress.



The orders you can give in-game are dependent upon a slowly regenerating bar, which will be lowered as you start to order your troops to do things. Initially, this causes little problem, but as you get to control more divisions of infantry and cavalry, you find that your order capabilities run out extremely quickly. Just assigning three or four different units to do different things can knock your bar down to zero.

If this was actually a tactical part of the game and had a genuine reason for existing, based upon ancient warfare abilities, then this might have merely served as an extra tactical nuance to the game. But the sheer illogical stupidity of it just makes the soul despair.

For instance, your Militia might be having trouble with some Heavy Cavalry, and there just happen to be some War Elephants and some Praetorians standing aimlessly nearby. So you order the elephants onto the enemy cavalry, only to find you cannot do the same with the Praetorians through lack of order points. And all the while the dumb AI means your Praetorians will stare glumly at nothing, despite their comrades being torn to shreds a few paces away.

Then you have to factor in the unclickability. Quite simply, there are rather obscure hotspots for each and every division of units. There appears to be no rhyme or reason to this, as clicking on similarly logical locations within a division will frequently yield enormously varied results.



The pain comes however, when you attempt to order a unit to attack somewhere, and instead you will miss the hotspot, and they will simply move there instead of attacking the enemy you targeted. So your precious order points are wasted fruitlessly upon an endlessly futile exercise instigated by the frustrating hotpots, or lack thereof.

Then you get bounteous heaps of other battlefield inadequacies, such as patrols that will stop half way through their advance without cause, or archers who will fire upon the first enemy they encounter, then somehow forget about all the other ones nearby, instead preferring to wait patiently for you to identify what precise target you would like them to attack next.

The possibly unfair, but inevitable comparison to Rome: Total War shows up just how deficient Legion Arena is in all aspects of RTS. The AI in particular is really quite horrendous, and although I won’t delve into the minutiae of the faults and problems, they really do show when viewed in comparison with one of the RTS big boys. Never does the action feel real enough to pass for a real-life battle.

Graphics fail to impress, with the rather angular 3D shapes cutting a rough edge when zoomed up close. The music score is really quite fantastic; until you realise that the same track is played for every single battle without fail, and eventually the brilliance fades into a moderate annoyance.



Whilst Legion Arena does certainly offer mild enjoyment, the whole experience is extremely narrow in scope and potential. So much more could have been achieved with just a little more planning and development. Not the proudest moment for Slitherine then, but if they can continue to push their ideas forwards even more, they may come up with something that can truly rival Rome next time.

Review by Adam Shirley.