Take one-part Rome: Total War and one-part Civilization and you will end up with something that looks striking like Aggressors: Ancient Rome.  The default movement and feel of the game is could be ripped out of the first game, but all management and diplomacy could be borrowed from the second.  While others before it have tried this process, this game manages in many ways to pull of feats that many have failed at.

The biggest issue with the game is simply that it feels like it was the first of its class.  Where the others in the aforementioned titles had time to figure out where they were going, Aggressors is still on there first step.  In many places this shows, the most obvious is the way that it handles resolution when starting up.  There was a certain bug encountered when first played that set the resolution to the max that my computer could handle, but no my monitors, which was fun to fix.  There are slight issues that pop up similar to this, but nothing that would break the game itself.  More growing pains than red flags.

Aside from those issues the game play was interesting.  It is easy to get sucked into the natural flow of the game and start losing hours on the thoughts of what the next turn could bring, how to upgrade a now or how to position a unit to hopefully dissuade advances of possibly untoward armies.  As anyone who has played Civilization can attest to, the feeling of losing an entire night to one more turn is something that creeps in easy, and it is very much present in this game.

While this game is not perfect, and it would honestly be shocking if something this truly ambitious was right out of the gate, it is a rather good attempt at the first time around.  For fans of either the Total War series of Civ will be happy to pick it up and spend some serious time on it.  The game is reasonably priced around 30 dollars at the moment, so it isn’t going to break the bank either.