Rome: Total War Gold-Edition

In a real way, Rome: Total War is the absolute exemplar of PC gaming. It's about what only PCs can really do: that is, everything, and everything at once. In an age of comfortable genre-games, the Total War series have always stood slightly aside from the main thrust of culture. Anything cerebral and PC-centred, they take from, with even trace elements of RPGs showing up. However, the two great atrium of Rome's bulging heart are labeled "Strategy" and "Tactics". In the former, you organise your growing domain on a Civilisation-styled map. In the latter, you lead your massed forces into action in lusciously rendered fully polygonal 3D worlds. It's very big.

The full campaign game will cause fear-related heart attacks on the more casual gamer. This places you as one of the three families in Republic-era Rome, setting forth to carve an empire from the yielding flesh of B.C. Europe. Even if you choose to auto-resolve most of the battles, set on the lower difficulty levels, you're looking at some serious game playing time - your correspondent currently has a bedraggled half-beard due to how its dissolved his social life - before you turn on your masters and become Emperor.

Senate aspects are particularly welcome. In previous Total Wars, the latter part of the campaign, where you mopped up the remaining resistance, was where attention began to wander. Here, at the exact point where you're in a position to bully almost anyone into submission, your allies turn on you for fear of your growing popularity, leading to a suitably dramatic final act as you take on Rome itself. The move from slaughtering rag-taggle barbarians to locking gladius with disciplined ranks of legionnaires is particularly memorable.

By playing through as the Romans, you're learning invaluable lessons about the game, which means by the time it comes to play as their foes, ( the Greeks, Egyptians, Gauls, Carthagians) anyone will be capable of attempting the task. For those who just wish to dabble, there's a (excellent) shorter tutorial campaign, an abridged version of the full campaign, the tactical-scale multiplayer and the genuinely lush historical battles - which are also some of the best historical lessons I've ever seen included in a PC videogame. It's just as friendly to get into as a Total War game could ever be. Rome claims its laurels and marches up the throne...