Originally conceived as the first part of a franchise aimed at a specifically western audience, the sequel was in the early stages of development when the first game was released. The plot is a fictionalized version of the assassination of Julius Caesar, focusing on two characters, Agrippa, a soldier whose father is accused of murdering Caesar, and who is forced to fight in the gladiatorial arenas, and Octavianus, who sets about proving Agrippa's father's innocence. The game was released in Europe and North America in February, and in Japan in March. I recommend it to fans of either.Shadow of Rome is a 2005 action-adventure game developed and published by Capcom for the PlayStation 2. It’s been overshadowed by other recent high-profile releases, but Shadow of Rome is a great action game and an entertaining stealth game. I figure in about five years, Shadow of Rome will start showing up in magazine articles about “cult” games, or the best-kept secrets on the PS2. He’s suicidal he’ll stand there like a dog that’s being shown a card trick while someone is hacking at him with a poleaxe. There’s one arena battle where you have to rescue a guy, and it’s like Capcom deliberately set out to make a new poster child for annoying escort missions everywhere. You can get the same guy to fall for the same trick fifteen times in a row if you really feel like it, and any gladiatorial combat where you’re forced to cooperate with an NPC ally is far more frustrating than it has to be. The camera could stand to be pulled a bit further back during the most intense fight scenes, the graphics are muddy at times, and the NPCs’ AI is roughly comparable to that of radishes. Shadow of Rome’s actual flaws, as opposed to questionable gameplay quirks, are really more like nitpicks. There are kung-fu midgets in Agrippa’s game. A high-velocity encounter with a midget’s face should not bust a greatsword, and that’s all there is to it. That said, tthe fragility of Roman steel occasionally descends to the level of farce. As a matter of fact, I kind of like it it keeps combat from devolving into the usual “charge and hammer X” idiocies that characterize a lot of 3D brawlers. You’re constantly stealing a new sword to replace the one you just busted over some mook’s head.
Whether it’s because of inferior Roman weaponcrafting or the fact that Agrippa appears to be a caveman, weapons break a lot in this game. If you play to the crowd by varying your attacks or showing off, they’ll throw you new weapons, which you will need. The more elaborate the bloodshed in the arena, the more the crowd loves it. This is the kind of action where you can hack off somebody’s arm with a greataxe, then pick that arm up and beat somebody with it. Octavianus’s game has a kind of slapsticky, Saturday-afternoon-TV quality to it Agrippa, on the other hand, is cutting people in half for the amusement of screaming Roman crowds. There’s one sequence where you can take out an entire group of bandits with a couple of banana peels it takes a while to set up, but it’s a lot of fun.Īgrippa’s levels are more frustrating. If Octavianus is infiltrating a location, you get around by sneaking past people while their backs are turned, stealing somebody’s clothes and bluffing your way through any close encounters, or improvising weapons or distractions out of whatever happens to be handy. When you’re running around on the streets of Rome, the gameplay’s sort of pleasantly retro, where you get around obstacles by talking to people or thinking outside the box. Of the two modes in Shadow of Rome, I’m probably more impressed with Octavianus’s game. (For example, it’d make a helluva Resident Evil or Dino Crisis game.) Such is not the case here, and I’d go so far as to say that the engine deserves to be reused.
Both modes use the same engine, which is nothing short of amazing it’s been my experience that when you try to get one engine to do two wildly dissonant things within the same title, the situation rapidly deteriorates. Shadow of Rome is equally divided between Agrippa’s game, an extraordinarily bloody brawler set on various battlefields and arenas, and Octavianus’s, which is about half stealth and half straightforward adventure game. If Agrippa can win the tournament, he’ll have a chance to rescue his father and reveal Caesar’s true assassins. A tournament is being held to determine who will have the honor of executing Vipsanius. While Octavianus remains in Rome and tries to solve the mystery of Caesar’s murder, Agrippa gives up his station and becomes a gladiator. A Roman soldier named Vipsanius is framed for Caesar’s murder, but both Caesar’s nephew Octavianus (the future Augustus Caesar) and Vipsanius’s son Agrippa, a young general in the Roman legions, know that Vipsanius is innocent. Caesar’s career is cut short by his assassination on March 15th, throwing the Roman Empire into chaos.
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