Ancient technology

After all that fancy setup, battles usually degenerate to a mess like this.

Great Battles of Rome looks like it was actually developed during Roman times - the graphics engine and available graphical options are that basic. You can switch off grass and shadows, and fiddle with LOD settings, but the visual quality of the game remains mostly the same. The screenshots displayed here are captured at a low resolution, because that's the maximum (and only) resolution of the game. It's obvious that the title was developed primarily with the PSP and PS2 versions in mind, and PC version is just a quick port with the main goal being the ability to run it on just about any PC.

And it truly runs on anything. For the first time I ran out of test systems to experiment with - everything at my disposal was too advanced. I had to go and borrow an old laptop to try and find the low end, and even the old Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo laptop I found with Intel 82855 ran the game flawlessly with the abysmally slow integrated Intel graphics chip. So, based on that I can say that whatever your PC is, it can run Great Battles of Rome - with the only caveat being that with just 256MB memory you will get some nasty swapping, which is to be expected as XP itself uses almost that much RAM just to start up. It will work even with 256MB, but 512MB is strongly recommended.

Visually the game is like an ancient cousin of the Total War series.

Of course the flipside of all this is that the game looks positively ancient. The visuals would've been basic even five years ago, and while the models and landscapes used are not bad art, they are made with the bare minimum of polygons and with very crude textures; clearly designed with the much smaller memory footprints of the consoles. Armies are also pretty small - you never get the feeling that you have thousands of men facing off each other. Even for a PS2 game, Great Battles of Rome looks average, and on a modern PC it's just looks horrible.