Shadow of Rome review

I'm in two minds about Shadow of Rome (and for once it's not because I'm locked in the gloomy basement of a gothic asylum screaming about the eldritch horrors that prowl the echoing corridors of my ancestral home and laundry basket).

One of these minds is a big burly fellow with a penchant for showering in blood after a little light evisceration. "Hur hur hur," it says. "Mind One SMASH." And off it goes, mashing buttons and foes alike, carving bloody and gory swathes through gladiatorial arenas in search of justice, glory, and a dash of germolene for an aching button finger.

The other's a wiry little fella, light on his feet and sneaky as a Nike-wearing fox. "Like I shadow I am" he whispers, vanishing into the shadows, all cunning disguises and stealthy backstabbing. Then he drops down dead when someone accidentally treads on his toe. Or sneezes slightly too loudly. Or just frowns very hard in his general direction.

By a startling coincidence, my attack of multiple personality disorder came in very handy when reviewing Shadow of Rome, since it's essentially two games uneasily occupying a single bod. While their combined presence never quite derails the whole, at times it frustratingly prevents it achieving its full potential.

"Two gamestyles, two characters, one story" as a particularly badly-written bit of ad copy might go. Let's start from there.

Roman in the Gloamin

As the title subtly hints, the whole thing's set in Rome. Her mightiest emperor, Julius Caesar has been murdered - assassinated - and although a culprit is quickly found, not everyone is certain that justice has been done.

The game follows the story of two of these doubters: Agrippa, the centurion son of the scapegoat, and his best friend Octavanius, nephew of the murdered Caesar. Together, by different roads, they are made to discover - and ultimately confront - the various schemes and factions that conceal the festering rot at the Empire's heart.

It's a fantastic setting, brutal and civilised all at once - a contrast the game plays up stylistically and mechanically - and the story makes good use of it. In fact, the plot and narrative are major draws which you deserve to discover unspoiled; a sort of swords and sandals conspiracy thriller where you'll use wit and brawn to save the day and bring the light of truth to the shadows of Rome.

As long as by wit you mean sneak and by brawn you mean slice into meaty chunks with a variety of spiky, yet fragile, weapons. Accepting these definitions, you'll find play alternates between Agrippa, where you will thump things repeatedly, and Octavanius, where you will repeatedly try not to be thumped by things (such as strong gusts of wind).

Agrippa: Brawn

Agrippa likes to hit things, and Shadow of Rome is pleased to accommodate him. With the occasional chariot-racing exception, his levels are a third-person combo-chaining slice of brutality and ultraviolence that's almost ludicrously over-the-top; and yet, paradoxically, they're anchored to reality by the realisation of the various levels and in particular the way your comrades die screaming around you.

In early levels these are fellow soldiers backing you up in forests and Saxon forts; later they become gladiatorial team-mates and comrades-in-arms as Agrippa determines to win the arena battles in order to win the chance to become the executioner of his accused father.

Blood will fountain in arterial sprays, limbs will be hacked into fleshy ribbons, and heads will roll like footballs - unless you decide to pick them up and start laying into your opponents with them.

Body parts aside, there's a large variety of weapons to smite with, both missile and melee. The smaller weapons do less damage but allow you to wield another sub-weapon or shield, while the larger - unsurprisingly - do a lot more damage but are slower, more cumbersome, and have to be carried in both hands.

Hilariously, whether you're using a severed arm or an enormous Freudian warhammer, at best you'll only get a few swings before the weapon disintegrates. Presumably the designers employed the service of a crack historian who discovered a hitherto undocumented fact about this period in Roman history: due to someone losing all the proper materials in an ill-advised game of Strip Mining, the elite troops of the mighty Roman Empire were reduced to swinging papier mache replicas and making scary faces like a bunch of live roleplayers on a Sunday afternoon. Crack historian? Historian on crack, more like...

The mechanics of this bloody but fragile death dealing aren't particularly complicated - lengthy combo sequences are out in favour of shorter strings of two buttons in conjunction with the left analogue stick.

There's an impressive number of killing strokes (and AI reactions to their missing bits) all of which seem equally impressively animated. Not that I ever imagined I'd end up describe them as "impressive," but there's something oddly and undeniably compelling about trying to find new ways of splashing buckets of blood on the arena sands.

The longer arena sequences can occasionally descend into weary button mashing, true, but underneath the excitement and bloodlust, the mechanics reward cold, careful planning - the truly effective gladiator is the one that bides their time in attacking - and playing to the crowd.

This fickle mob is often the deciding factor in battles - impress them enough (after the right series of combos or linked attacks, for instance) and they'll throw you healing items or better weapon. In your case these are often lifesavers (and pretty much the opposite for your enemies).

There's something altogether magnificent about a rapturous crowd chanting Agrippa's name, especially in a boss encounter at the end of an arena bout. These employ a good variety of styles and setups - team battles (with surprisingly decent AI), solo last man standing affairs, sieges, and even escort-style missions. Remarkably, the chariot-racing opportunity later on doesn't feel tacked on, even if does lack the visceral bite of the combat sequences.

Octavanius: Not So Solid Sn(e)ak(e)

And then there's Octavanius, and all that excitement drains away like a free drum of Brasso at a tramp convention.

While Agrippa battles his way to the rescue of his father, Octavanius takes a more cerebral, political route to exposing the conspiracy surrounding his uncle's death. He'll use planning, improvisation, and...oh, all right, all right. It's the Obligatory Third Person Stealth Sequences, and they're just as welcome and absorbing as you'd expect from irritating, one-mistake-and-you're-kicking-the-bucket interruptions to the business of dicing people into quivering lumps of meat.

Well...that's not quite fair. It's not that the Octavanius sections are bad, not bad as such. In fact, to begin with it all seems promising. Good ideas rapidly present themselves: the opportunity to disguise yourself in appropriate togs and quarters to store them, the chance to talk your way out of dangerous situations (or into even worse ones), and a variety of sneaky ways to see off trouble, from the old strangling cord to that trusty comic staple, the banana skin.

There's even a chance to wander through various areas of Rome before taking on the mission. This is useful both to flesh out the setting and plot, getting a sense of how the people are responding to the situation, and to learn things that might come in useful when trying to convince suspicious guards that yes, really, you should be wandering around in the Evidence Room making off with vital clues to who really dunnit.

Yet somehow, all those good ideas end up mooching around not doing anything in particular, and the disappointment is all the more acute for it. It's quickly clear that guards are nothing but thinly-veiled automatons, walking game mechanics made manifest which do little other than loudly remind you that YES YOU ARE PLAYING A GAME, HELLO in a way which works with an almost gleeful malice against the atmosphere of the story's cut-scenes and Agrippa's bloody battles.

And yes, you can disguise yourself, and yes you can knock them out, and yes you can hide in the many conveniently placed pots which the crack-addled historian evidently decreed littered the houses and byways of ancient Rome, but it's just not enough to distinguish the stealth from the faceless wannabees aspiring to the twin thrones of Snake and Fisher.

In many ways, it's better not to think of this as stealth at all, but rather a sort of irritating and unwieldy puzzle game - the designers even seem to tacitly admit this by flagging A Correct Solution pretty clearly in their placement of patrols, pots, and items. On the other hand, another perfectly valid tactic seems to be simply to throw caution to the winds and leg it to the end of the level or the cut-scene triggering room, whereupon the idiot guards will simply forget they've ever seen you.

(Plus: one hit from a weapon and Octavanius falls over? The nephew of the mighty Caesar has all the stamina of a particularly dead dog? Heck, even Thief's Garret, wimpiest of all the princes of sneakdom had a health bar. And a nifty mechanical eye.)

The Ideas of March

Uniting these two strands of gameplay is the story. Well-paced, consistently interesting, involving, and refreshingly free of over-reliance on cliché, it's helped considerably by the choice of setting which lends everything a certain freshness. Of course, historical accuracy takes a back seat to dramatic sensibility: this is very much the ancient Rome of the cinema, in sensibility and in story, with a light dusting of historical fact to lend verisimilitude.

It's an engaging mix, backed up by a musical score which stays firmly in the orchestral epic camp and at times, particularly in battles, does an excellent job of placing firmly in the Russell Crowe sized sandals of your cinematic forebears.

The sound effects are equally solid, underscoring every blow with satisfying evocations of pain. Even the voice acting is almost entirely acceptable, even decent in a few cases - although the translation displays a certain idiosyncrasy from time to time, it's nothing too jarring.

Graphically, Shadow of Rome understands the limits of the console and works with them. The cut-scenes and in-game angles employ a slightly stylised effect. There's exactly the right sort of cinematic imagination behind them, using scale and the odd depth-of-field effect to convey a sense of scale and tarnished grandeur which draws attention away from some less than impressive texture work.

In the game proper, faces are detailed and emotive, and armour and weapons gleam and reflect light (until they're coated with a variety of internal organs, that is ) in a way which is understatedly impressive. It's worth emphasising again the fluid grace of the combat animation – foes and comrades alike move convincingly, gradually slowing and staggering towards their super-sized helping of blood-soaked death.

Two Characters. Two Minds. Two Opinions

Well. Nearly.

Agrippa's sections are satisfyingly visceral, the no-punch-pulled approach giving a gut emotional connection to unfolding events – at least when it's not busy punching you in them. But to find out what happens next – and you want to do that, believe me – and to get onto the next bout of carnage, you have to trawl through the third-rate puzzle/stealth of Octavanius.

Caesar's nephew really deserved better than becoming irritating blockades in the path of progress through the arenas – perhaps if his story had been a seperate unlockable after Agrippa's was completed it might have done better to hide the weaknesses in the execution. Or perhaps if the information-gathering, RPG-lite interludes between stealth missions had been more expansive ...but there, it's no use judging Shadow of Rome on what it could have been.

So what is it? Fun. Frustrating. Gory. Cerebral. Engaging. Off-putting. Brutal and civilised. A thing of uneasily juxtaposed opposites, much like the Empire it's set in (and the contents of my underwear drawer).

If you can reconcile them, you'll discover plenty to enjoy waiting in the Shadow of Rome.