Never Second in Rome

Lore: good. Gameplay: Plus 54 advantage check, still fail. Progression: Extremely snow bally. (did not try iron man mode as of writing this) Graphics: Pixel. Overall I had a good time with this game over the weekend, i've yet to try the iron man mode of this game, which is only accessible after beating the game once, which I find kinda annoying especially when the campaign is long, and the possibility of ruining your character at the start of the campaign is pretty high which leads to restarting (slightly reduced by having your century reset during the campaign). The game is made by 1 person which is pretty cool he definitely passed all the INT checks IRL, Respect+.

I have wasted so many fun hours on this game over the years (early access i guess). Apparently as I write this i only have 5.9 hours allegedly but man its so memorable that it stuck in my head as much more time played (in a good way). Fun recommend from me. EDIT: This game is also very fun but I thought it was on this Dev's first game haha. Still recommend this one

I want to get into the game, the clunkyness of the english used is really taking me out of it. I'd recommend it to be proofread by someone w good grasp of the language.

game good

Great trip through middle-Roman history from a unique perspective, with an engaging tactical-sim game to boot.

I liked the previous version of the game, however this one is quite underwhelming. I don't enjoy it, and I would suggest you skip it. The first game was fairly punchy, and while the combat system was somewhat strange, the combat was just a part of what was sort of a visual novel and a narrative experience combined with the combat system. You could get through a run in a few hours, and could quickly iterate on what builds worked well. This game is much longer, but not in a good way. There are extended combat sequences that are uninteresting, and multiple fights chained together. There are now formation battles which I find quite underwhelming. The story has bloated significantly. The game is broken into chunks. It seemed cool and promising - manage a Roman soldier's life from the start to the finish. Given how much combat there is now, the fact that it's so incredibly slow (Yes I enabled all the speedup options) both in the individual combat and the formation combat is quite unfortunate. The developer seems to have felt that the first game was too easy (it wasn't), and has decided to make the combat much more grueling. This spike in difficulty meant there was really only one viable build, which the developer promptly nerfed in a patch. Okay, the dev wants this game to be dark souls, and I just need to skill up, right? Nah, this is a multi hour slog, where I can't make meaningful build choices, I also can't make meaningful choices during combat, and I can't make meaningful choices during the formation combat. Same with the training. Each one feels like a puzzle, and because of the desire for high difficulty, and limited mechanics in each module, there's really only one solution. The story is very bland and something about the scope and scale of it - somehow with the increased amount of it, the story becomes a drag, and there's not a great way to speed it up, so there's just a ton of downtime between the uninteresting fights. Sid Meier defined a game as "a series of interesting choices" and after 5 hours I can tell you that none of the choices in the various modes (training, individual combat, formation combat, and the narrative decisions) are interesting to me. The pacing is rough, and the difficulty is completely out of whack with such an overall uninteresting game. When you make something really challenging, and it's not very exciting, it feels more fiddly and demanding than creating an impression of "yeah this is like Dark Souls!"

Just finished the game and I am happy to recommend it. I enjoyed the gameplay loop and story telling through history. Its a unique perspective of the events being told and the writing did a good job of balancing exposition and narrative . There were some minigames that were more annoying than fun but they were also quick to finish and didn't overstay their welcome. I'm not sure why the creator would stop people from playing iron man before completing a normal game because I feel like most people will probably only give it a play through once.

Great game. Worthy of support, especially considering it has been made by just 1 person.