Now Playing: The Last Roman (DLC)

The Last Roman is a mini-expansion to Total War: Attila. Compared to the recently released Age of Charlemagne, this DLC is a far smaller and limited piece of content. It revolves around the General Belisarius, a hero sent to reclaim the lost lands of the Western Roman Empire by the Emperor Justinian.

The Last Roman features a new campaign map which is focused almost entirely on Italy, the north coast of Africa, and Spain. Although these regions are more detailed here than in the base game, the map feels disappointingly small, an issue compounded by the fact that the territory is split between a very small number of large factions. 

As you would expect, there are new units to recruit and technologies to research, but nothing that’s a great departure from the core game. What makes The Last Roman unique is choosing to play as the Roman expedition. It’s essentially the horde mechanic of Attila with the twist that it’s now the Romans who are the ‘barbarian’ invaders.

And initially, this twist provides quite an enjoyable experience. You begin in Africa with two separate camps, and very rapidly find yourself under threat. But this early struggle to survive and reclaim land for Justinian sadly doesn’t last very long.

After a single large land battle, I effectively wiped out all opposition within the starting region, leaving me free to march from settlement to settlement, capturing them with zero resistance. And from there, things only got easier. At points in the campaign I was rewarded with new forces, free of any upkeep cost for several turns, allowing me to blitz my way across the map, capturing territory with little effort.

Because although the factions you’ll be fighting control large areas of territory, they seem to lack any serious military force. I swept through Africa and Italy, completing my campaign objectives with only a handful of serious or challenging engagements. The vast majority of my time with The Last Roman was spent fighting weak garrisons in unprotected settlements.

Perhaps this was a difficulty issue, or perhaps it was simply how this campaign played out. After all, each campaign will be different. I could have also chosen not to reclaim land for Justinian, but to claim it for myself and establish my own faction. But doing so discards the only truly unique feature that The Last Roman offers – playing as a Roman horde.

The same is true of the other major factions, all of which are playable, although I see no reason to bother. After all, I have the core game with a far larger map for something like that. No, the only reason to play this DLC is for the unique experience of the Roman horde, but sadly it’s something of an underwhelming experience.

In its favour, when playing as the Roman expedition, The Last Roman does offer a lot of story based events with choices to make that will affect your campaign. But there’s nothing here that will radically alter how things play out – it’s more of a choice between X increase in Y, or X increase in Z.

There’s little more I have to say about The Last Roman. Compared to Age of Charlemagne, it’s a weak piece of content that I couldn’t recommend, even for the novelty of playing as a Roman horde. Whereas with AoC I’ve already completed campaigns as three factions and I’m ready to get stuck into a fourth, I have no desire to revisit TLR after completing my expedition campaign. Because outside of that, it offers nothing of note.

5/10