TOTAL WAR SAGA TROY WINDOWS 10

Total War: Pharaoh, which I will acknowledge once and once only as being officially stylised PHARAOH, is almost certainly the most systemically interesting and quality-of-life-full a Total War game has been at launch for a very long time. It may be an admission on both our parts that, for all its simulated complexity, Total War is really for people who’d be just as happy playing with those little elasticated catapults and plastic castles, if we could still sit on the floor without our pelvises crumbling into soup mix. That these are among my absolute favourite Total War moments may say something about the level of satisfaction to be found elsewhere in the series’ strategy sandboxes, at times as robust as ancient oaks, others as stale as ancient wotsits.

Sometimes, when I’m winning a Total War battle handily, I like to pick an absolutely haggard group of low-tier hopelesses and spend the rest of the fight zoomed in on them, narrativising their high-stakes struggles in a rich and velvety internal monologue that monopolises my attention so fully that I more or less ignore the rest of the battle.

TOTAL WAR SAGA TROY WINDOWS 10

Reviewed on: Intel Core i5-8600K, 16GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 2070, Windows 10.

But the fundamental issues of Total War - mainly enemy battle AI - are far too entrenched to fix in a few years, and the bronze age setting doesn’t allow for enough unit variation to make up for them. Every single change Pharaoh makes to Troy is for the better, and some changes are so good that it’s going to be difficult to play any Total War without them going forward.

Total war saga troy