YOU AND YOUR ARMY, JUST ROMAN AROUND

Total War: Rome Remastered (PC, £24.99) Verdict: Toga party

FRIENDS, Romans, countrymen, lend me your keyboards — for this week, one of the greatest PC games ever created has been remade for modern systems and expectations.

The new edition is called Total War: Rome Remastered. When the original came out in 2004, it was the third entry in the Total War series, after ones set in feudal Japan and feudal Europe, but it felt like the first to really leave a sandal-mark on the culture. The Beeb even built a game show around Rome: Total War, with contestants playing at being ancient generals. And that is the point of Total War: Rome Remastered. You gather your troops on some plateau and face off against the Gauls, the Scythians or whoever. Click here to move your archers into an advantageous position. Doubleclick there to send your cavalry crashing into the enemy’s flank.

Or, rather, the battles are half the point of the game. The other half borrows from the older Civilization games and has you managing your resources, growing your cities and building your empire across a broader world map. It’s a tremendously satisfying mix.

The remaster doesn’t change much. This is still fundamentally the same game that came out in 2004, but with lovely graphical embellishments and refinements to its interfaces. It also includes all the original expansions, so you can play as Alexander the Great or during the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

This is a suitably reverential way of doing things, but it also exposes some of game’s creakiness when compared with more recent Total War entries, such as the brilliant Three Kingdoms. Greatness then doesn’t entirely translate to greatness now.

Still, as some guy once said: ‘Cry “havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war.’