Ballistics Report

Pros

Sound
The accents on non-Roman units are annoying but otherwise, R:TW has surprisingly good speech, especially for a Creative Assembly game.

Graphics
This is the only game in the world which will let you throw 3,000 of your individually rendered men against a foe’s similarly sized army. The detail is so great, sometimes I can just imagine an individual member of the elite Urban Cohort hawk, clear his throat, and spit on the ground in contempt of the show of force those Germans try to make.

Gameplay
This is quite likely the best strategy game ever. It combines a solid strategic campaign with an amazing tactical engine – and you can play custom tactical battles without worrying about the campaign, or play the campaign without engaging in a single battle outside the tutorial.

Interface
It’s still a little quirky, but if you go along with the way the designers intended it to work, the interface is very efficient. Those are words I never imagined I’d use to describe this game, after Medieval.

Cons

Minor Quibbles
There’s really a lot of small things that we wish the developers had done differently, like perhaps not having the strategic AI focus on the player so much (the Julii and Gauls have warred in every game, except the one I’m playing as Germania). Overall though, these are tweakable issues or bugs that we only mention in order to justify the “Con” section at all.