Shadow of Rome

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.

Packs some of the most brutal hand-to-hand combat ever, and there's plenty of story and intrigue to conveniently justify all the gory violence.

It efficiently captures the mood and spirit of ancient Rome through bloody battles, exhilarating chariot races, and a few minor stealth sequences, all intertwined with a good moving story and impressive (for the most part) gameplay.

The equivalent of a summer action flick with a decent plot. It won't make you think too hard and the slow parts can get a little boring and clumsy, but the action is fun enough to redeem it.

The recreation of Rome, while not completely accurate, feels like Rome, and the wilderness sections are likewise done well. The enemies, however, do tend to be a bit bland, and it doesn’t take long until it feels like the same enemy has been killed numerous times.

An undoubtedly flawed, but fun experience - Agrippa’s combat is enjoyable, engaging, and exhilarating, whereas Octavianus’ stealth sections offer nothing new and are fairly limited.

The banality of the stealth sections and the laboured story telling are not worth the fun of the combat. The idea to blend together the two distinct, yet very successful in their own right, styles was interesting - but here the sum of the parts is much less than the total, and that’s your irony.

very realistic ancient Rome, recommended to you, graphics, radgol, phisics, store campain its beautiful

It is a weird game. The combat gameplay is awesome, but the stealth sections are so bad, broken and frustrating that I almost quit the game many, many times.

Decent game. The story is so --so, scoring is great, visual is decent, and the voice is also great

Decent story, **** stealth, jarringly, jaw-droppingly infuriating combat. Downright rotten Ai, poor excuses of 'team battles', and buggy unbalanced combat make the combat segments unplayable.

A game that fell behind already when it was released. Only managed to do about two thirds of the game, but this was already way to much, as it seems it is like 10 hours long. Great, some would say, seems like a lot content in here, but what is the quality you get? To start with the not so important things: It sounds god damn annoying. Always the same nerve wrecking and completely unfitting background music and small variety of good enough ambient sounds. The cutscenes, protagonists(that damn sneaky sunny boy straight outta Final Fantasy) and storytelling is the typical late 90s/early 2000s Capcom stuff, cringy and very japanese. Not the best initial situation for Shadow of Rome, but lets talk about the game itself. The better half is the fighting. Very straight forward, simple and quick to learn, but also very repetitive and fighting multiple enemies is more a fight against the lock on function and sometimes the camera. All in all good enough for hack and slay enthusiats, but everyone else will be bored out pretty quick. It does not help that the weapons are brittle as hell. You will have to look or ask the crowd for new one after a handful of hits. At least there is a variation of weapons that behave very differently. The whole fighting is based on this wear and tear of weapons. Kind of ok, but in 2005 God of War was released and showed how a hack and slay has to be on the PS2, this game is definitely not of the same quality. The other half of the game, oh lord, the stealth levels. It is comically idiotic. Imagine yourself sneaking around and getting caught while strangling a guard putting on his clothes. To get out of this precarious situation you run around just one corner, jump into a giant vase and only have to wait a few seconds until the guards will go away and say they must have imagined this. After that you stick you head out of the vase while the same guards walk five meters away looking directly at you and the start the chase again. If you duck fast enough they will lose your trace again afterjust some seconds. In the next moment you climb out of the vase and walk past the guards in your freshly stolen clothes. Hilariously bad AI. The hole stealth movement consists of running, walking, crouched walking and pressing the action button. The game was released in the same year as Splinter Cell Chaos Theory and Capcom delivers this atrocity. The leveldesign in general is just primitve. You play all scenarios in very limited space, either a small arena or claustrophobic tight corridors. If the graphic quality was stunningly good to justify those smal areas, connected via short loading screens, this might be ok, but it is barely the PS2 average. There is no reason to play this game but o see the massive difference of quality in games released in 2005 for PS2