Rome: Total War (PC)

Graphically Rome: Total War (RTW) is very impressive, and the AI is pretty darn good, but unfortunatley there are some rough spots, with my main gripe being naval combat.

The game has some fantastic land battles, it's reasonably easy to control troop groupings, you can see individuals within those groups responding to the situation you put them in, you can watch individuals within troop groupings fight with individuals from enemys squads, and you can move the camera angle around to your hearts content, but when it comes to naval battles you get the result, no animated battles, no ability to control tactics, just an end result, which really got on my nerves. Don't get me wrong, the AI is good, but there are always times when a human can use some tactics which the AI wouldn't have thought of.

You should write off long periods of time to play the game in full. It's not a typical "heres a map get stuck in" game where you can finish a skirmish off in a couple of hours and come back another day and start again, RTW has a campaign mode that can keep you occupied for days.

All in all I enjoy it and think it's a pretty good game.