98… 99… 100%, ladies and gentlemen, war is now total and ready to be waged. It’s been unlocked on Steam for the past eight and a half hours, in fact, and if you were to locate the miniscule PC section in your nearest bricks-and-mortar videogame retailer you’d find a legionnaire glaring up at you from the shelves, all plumes and grimaces. “Grr,” he seems to say. “War is a full-time gig, but deeply rewarding.”
Creative Assembly have released a new trailer for the occasion, which neatly collates all the potential lows ahead of us: death by snow, death by Senate, death, if not on, then near the Nile – it’s all here. And it turns out a man can make a real meal of his death if he’s important:
Today also marks the first day in Creative Assembly’s post-launch release calendar. The Pontus faction are a “fully-fledged” option alongside Rome, Carthage, Macedon, Iceni, Arverni, Suebi, Parthia and Egypt, and are free to download. Pre-orderers will already be reaping the culturally-varied benefits of the Greek States pack, and CA have promised a buffet of both paid-for and free DLC as the game, ah, matures.
We’re sort of hoping its AI might mature with it, and its paltry political system. Disappointment ran through our Fraser’s Total War: Rome II review like a stick of slightly unhappy rock – though he’s still playing it, which speaks volumes (on top of the thousands of words he’s already written – have you seen the size of that thing?).