Simple, low-budget, aimed at a different market

YouGamers is probably the wrong place to review Great Battles of Rome. It is obvious that the game is squarely aimed at the mass-market audience with its lowly system requirements, simple and laughably easy gameplay and low recommended retail price. If you take it as a game like that, it's not that bad. Just about any modern strategy game aimed at gamers offers far more depth than Great Battles of Rome, and as such it's hard to recommend it. At the same time I could see the same audience that buys those hunting simulator games would want to grab this for 20$, and actually not mind that it looks crude and is simple to play. Younger kids interested in Roman times might also find it to be a mildly entertaining way to learning some bits about Roman times while crushing some skulls. I'm not a history buff, so I can't say much about the historical accuracy of the battles or the cutscenes, but it seems to me that someone has done their homework for the game in this regard [You'd hope so given the tie-in with The History Channel! - Ed].

Unfortunately in the end, I have to score Great Battles of Rome as I would score any game, and the end result is not pretty. For us gamers, it's just too simple, looks utterly dated and offers no challenge to speak of. It's just in whole different league than, for example, Rome: Total War.

Summary of YouGamers Hardware Testing

The publisher of this game state the following specifications for their minimum and recommended requirements:

Component	Publisher's Minimum	Publisher's Recommended
Processor	Pentium IV 1.0GHz	Not specified
Memory	256 MB
Graphics Card	Supported 64MB video card
Graphics Card Example	NVIDIA GeForce 2 MX 64MB / ATI Radeon 7000 64MB
Free Disk Space	1 GB
Net Link	Not specified

To learn more about how YouGamers performs its hardware testing, click here. Through our extensive gameplay and hardware testing across the full spectrum of PC configurations, YouGamers suggests that one should use the following guidelines for an appropriate minimum and recommended setup:

Component	YouGamers Minimum	YouGamers Recommended
Processor	AMD Athlon 800Mhz / Intel Pentium III 800Mhz	AMD Athlon XP 1400Mhz / Intel Pentium 4 1400 MHz
Memory	512 MB	512 MB
Graphics Card	ATI Radeon 7000 64MB / NVIDIA GeForce 2 MX 64MB	ATI Radeon 8500 64MB / NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti4200 64MB
Free Disk Space	1 GB	1 GB
Net Link	Broadband	Broadband

Scores

To learn more about our scoring methodology, please click here.

Gameplay	47	Battles are short and incredibly easy. Between fights, all you can do is heal, upgrade and buy new units before heading to a new battle. There just isn't much of a game here.
Graphics	58	On the upside, it runs on just about any PC but that also means it looks like a game from 2002 - crude low-resolution textures, simple models and very basic user interface. Cutscene videos are also compressed to a messy quality.
Audio	70	While audio is notably average, it's probably the most polished part of the game. Narrative used over cutscenes introducing the player to the Roman history - probably from the vaults of the History Channel - works well.
Technology	45	The game engine is very low-tech, and there are no graphics options to speak of. Gameplay is forced to a single resolution, 1024x768, which makes the game look even worse on most TFT flat panels due to scaling.

OVERALL

Aimed at wholly different market. It's a game not meant for gamers - and suffers for it. Just too simple and ugly, even for a quick PS2 port.

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