Legion Arena

Your brave elephants majestically lumber into the enemy infantry, while your skirmishers rain javelins on their rear. As the cavalry rides in to deliver the final blow, you can’t help thinking that maybe you’ve seen this all before. With a bigger budget, too.
Despite the superficial resemblance to Rome: Total War, Legion Arena is just the latest 3D version of the same simple wargame the developer has been peddling for a while. It’s a very good update and occasionally looks even better than Rome does. There are some clipping issues and stuttering animations, but the technological advancement over Slitherine’s last game, Spartan, is remarkable.
There’s a feeling that Legion Arena is divided against itself. The battles are linked by a very good, though trimmed down, narration of Roman expansion. This concern for the past is undone by spelling and formatting errors and very limited art assets. The vaunted Macedonian phalanxes, for example, look just like the Roman triarii on your side of the field. You upgrade and customize your army to fight the campaign, but your polyglot force bears scant resemblance to any that Rome ever fielded. Want to replicate Caesar’s great victory at Pharsalus? You can’t, since your army will probably have an elephant or two in it and maybe some archaic skirmishers. The manual mentions a map design tool that is nowhere to be found.
The provided battles give a range of objectives, at least. Some require you to simply survive for a minute or two. Others have a quota of dead bodies to meet or avoid. Given the variety of terrain and victory conditions, some of the battles are tough nuts to crack. The Slitherine battle system has always been deeper than it looks, and the addition of waypoints and command orders has made it easier to plan grand movements.
It’s stuck, sadly, to a campaign system that just moves you from one location to the next. The déjà vu continues, as you see similar battles time and time again. The challenge doesn’t scale up as your army improves, either, especially in the Celtic campaign. Many later battles can be won simply by lining your troops up in a random order and letting them charge. Your reward for this glorious victory? Some experience points for your brave warriors and yet another enemy to fight. The only thing pushing you onward is the desire to finish the campaign, since the game has zero surprises after the first few stages. There is no skirmish mode to liven things up, and the multiplayer lobby is barren most of the time.
The M rating might lead you to think that Legion Arena will show you the brutality of ancient warfare with lots of gore and severed limbs. In fact, it’s the little naked Gauls that must have the ESRB concerned. If you want a lot of blood, look elsewhere. If you want a lot of repetition, you’ve come to the right place.

This article originally appeared in Computer Games Magazine #184