This is madness!” “This is Sparta!” “Our arrows will blot out the sun.” “Then we will fight in the shade.” “The farmers are revolting.” “Then we shall shuffle forward in our respective squads and…” and… well that’s all really. And we mean ‘really’.

According to 300, Spartans were awesome. According to The History Channel: Great Battles Of Rome the Romans were tiny regimented groups with little idea how to fight or what would make a good starting position on the battlefield. Before each battle, you can upgrade your troops and enlist more soldiers – this bit isn’t very interesting but it can give some of your troops a +2 chance of avoiding attacks. Next up is positioning your squads on the battlefield, is this interesting? Nope. And then when you finally start a battle and you fight with the controls to get everyone rushing at the enemy squads do the interest and fun appear? Nope.

All you do is ram your boys into theirs and wait until you’ve killed a sufficient number or until enough enemies have run away, and you win. But then – get this – you have to do that all over again. There might be slightly more or slightly better equipped enemies, but the rush tactics seems to work on everything. Unless it’s Hannibal’s elephants we guess. We didn’t get that far but it might take more than a squad of skirmishers and potato farmers to take them out.

Tim Empey