Just finished this game and what i can say - it's a great game. What's the saddest part - i've purchased it at january, played some hours and got disinterested, shelving it for months. Recently returned to it, and it got me captivated till the very end, heck i've even replayed the final sequence to get different ending, something that happens VERY rarely for me. The game is not without flaws mind you, but if you give it a chance it will reward you.
The things i've liked:
- A deep combat system with zones of control, deflections, armor, resistances and plethora of skills. Encounters are fair and well challenging keeping you on your toes throughout most missions. With the amount of fire and poison on some maps, the chaos of some fights was absolutely delightful. Combat scenarios are diverse, can't think of more combat scenarios that could be made with this particular game mechanics. Ambushes, sieges, protecting the fort, escaping forest fire.
- Music is absolutely excellent as is VO/VA
- Story, dialogues and choices are very well done giving the immersion of roman era most of the time. The main plot will actually devolve into a very grand story arch you most likely didn't predict at the start of the game. The choices and consequences are better than in 90% of RPG released after 2010.
Main arch enemy is very well done with believable reasons, as do every other main and supporting characters, finally a game with INTELLIGENT dialogue, that i didn't skip through the whole game, this is a high mark from me.
Things i didn't like:
- Combat can get repetitive in some instances, like trash/random encounters, similarly the conquering of regions get stale very fast and was detrimental to the game enjoyment, coupled with necessity of loading into the camp, it padded the game length for at least dozen of hours if not more. The game could be a 45-50 hours experience if the strategic part of the game would had been reworked with more respect to the player time. Simiarly some looting and traveling around the locations took very long to the exit, or you had to move through ladders several times to get to the chests, which takes so long. These are minor nuissances, but they add up. Some classes like rogue[?] are unbalanced and the biggest damage dealers overall.
- Wokeness and silliness that hit you with full force from act 2. I could understand the subterfurged female warrior, but then you keep bombarded with female characters, some of them extremely silly[raia sigh...] and of course you get female enemies, which would be fine if they were only relegated to the roles of lashing out mob, but nope, you have full female warriors among celts. Female story arch are strong independent wymyn of course. Also i had a gripe with how many egyptians from the north part of the country were portrayed as blacks, when we know that they were white.
- Pacing, as i said the beginning didn't captivate me after few missions. The game starts very strongly, and then the lack of combat options, coupled with the chore of traveling around the map and the big location that is chore to traverse[apollo temple] caused me to lose interest in the game, after all if the game doesn't value player time, it will 90% times a bad game, the desire to pad the game usually is used to hide its shallowness behind pad, BUT sometimes investors demand specific game length or developers don't know how to resolve some issues with travelling around map[what if you have fast travel from every place on map, and then you want to make an ambush at the exit without alerting player that something is going on, because he can't fast travel at this certain scenario?]. But i was proven wrong, and after the initial sluggish start, the game truly open up after you discover the name of your nemesis, and then you leave behind the aimless wandering to embark on pursuit of the villain.
- Graphic was kinda blurry for me despite using ultra settings.
- Crafting system should had been untied from camp mechanics tbh. It was annoying to wait to craft something, and have it gated behind camp upgrades. You wait for crafting to finish, load the camp, test it on gladiator training grounds and then reload or recraft, repeating the process, while you can't wait inside the camp. You gather a lot of trash that you have to dissasemble, and create your own stuff, you rarely get good purple items on enemies, you have to craft them.
Overall an easy 8+/10 from me due to great story, dialogs and characters, even with copious amount of woke and historical inaccuracy, the game conveys very well the image of late roman republic. This series seems to continue to improve with each iteration so i can't wait what will be in the next game. Imho this one is better than vikings or conquistador.
Hey Kit. 
