The game is trying to show you what the AI is doing while also trying to calculate turns for three-dozen different factions at the same time, so it gives you this weird five frames per second, skipping, halting, creaking imitation of one or two parts of the AI’s turn where you can sort of tell what’s going on but not really. The AI turns are also just as janky as they were in Rome II. This is with an Intel Core i5-3570K and a Nvidia GeForce GTX 970-a fairly beefy configuration well within the game’s recommended specs. I’ve also had the game outright freeze after the AI takes its turn, sitting on a weird white fog-screen for twenty seconds while the game struggles to return control to me. If I’m reaching for my phone to kill time in between turns, there’s a problem. I’ve had AI turns last upwards of thirty seconds at times, which is entirely too long in my opinion.

“Yeah, this all sounds good,” you’re thinking, “but how does it run?” Rome II was an unmitigated disaster at launch and for multiple months afterward.Īttila isn’t quite as bad, but there are still rough edges. If you’re coming to Attila with a bit of trepidation, I don’t blame you. So let’s talk about Total War: Rome II, this game’s immediate predecessor. This leaves you at a disadvantage if you want to play any of the horde-style factions-you’re learning on the fly. You take over the Visigoths, but in a scenario where they’ve already settled into a city. Which makes it all the stranger that the tutorial for the game, the so-called “prologue,” focuses on traditional Total War gameplay. Playing as a “normal” faction feels clunky and unrefined by comparison.

The ultra-mobile hordes have a few disadvantages-particularly their slow population growth and the fact that you can’t be building and waging war at the same time-but ultimately it feels like the whole game was designed around this concept. It’s a new way to breathe life into Total War. It’s a fascinating way to play Total War. Many of the remaining areas are under my control by proxy, as tribute states. Between the Huns slowly destroying the Eastern Roman Empire and me the West, we’ve reduced parts of Europe to nothingness. In Attila the map is slowly turning one color, but it’s the pale parchment yellow that signifies a “blank” tile-another city razed to the ground. In past Total War games you’d slowly see the map congeal into two or three colors as mighty empires were forged.

Rome total war crashes