Rome Total War: Barbarian Invasion: Rome If You Want To. Rome Around the World. Company: Sega If you've played Rome: Total War, you know how addictive it can be. RTW provides a rich gameplay experience which allows you to juggle your asset management skills, your planning skills and your ability to adapt your strategy to fit the changing world around you. All the while, you had to do your best to keep the Roman Senate happy. While this did provide some missions in the form of directives to accomplish to keep in the favor of the Senators, it tended to take away from your taste for absolute power and unquestioned leadership. Rome: Total War Barbarian Invasion gives you the opportunity to truly take control of your own Barbarian faction and make your march to total domination. You can choose how much advice you want from your advisors and, for that matter, whether you want to take their advice at all. Total control is yours for the taking - but you'll have to be shrewd, vicious and cunning to keep it; your warriors are anxious to follow a decisive leader of noble birth, but if you fail to maintain their awe, admiration and fear, you can find them turning on you. Newly introduced aspects of Rome: Total War Barbarian Invasion include: heavy importance on religion, loss of the importance of the Roman Senate, the ability to recruit Generals directly, new factions with their own distinctive mix of units, the ability to become a roaming horde when your last settlement is lost (only for certain factions), hordes can sack settlements to completely plunder a settlement and make it basically useless, some generals can now fight Night Battles, rebellions and revolts can now flare up into full civil wars for the Roman factions and the Goths, new battlefield abilities for certain units, such as swimming and the schiltrom and shield wall formations, the "Wonders of the World" are still present, but now have no effects on gameplay and the map has changed to reflect the 350 years of changes since the previous game. Also, for both custom battles and multiplayer games, you can now create, save and load preset armies for your faction. The new swimming ability is very easy to use; simply command your units to travel to a point across a river and they will swim across it if they have this ability. Be warned - this cannot be used to cross oceans and if your troops are tired, they could drown. I will be putting Rome: Total War Barbarian Invasion through its paces and posting a full review in the near future, but it looks like this is one strategy game that could definitely provide hours and hours of strategically challenging fun! NOTE: Rome: Total War Barbarian Invasion requires the full version of Rome: Total War (SOLD SEPARATELY) to play -Geck0, GameVortex Communications AKA Robert Perkins Related Links: Rome: Total War Website Rome: Total War Barbarian Invasion Sega Website Unofficial Total War Fansite - TotalWar.Org