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The shield wall is interesting enough, but given that it can't move, it's basically just a version of the one in Atilla but more restrictive. Things feel a little faster paced in places but the game does little to capture the precise point in time that the game is aiming to portray. Battles are pretty much the same as they were in Atilla. It wouldn't be too strong to say that the characters feel like those pointless figures that show up in Rome II's politics tab. Even in lategame Shogun II, I could remember the name of my finest generals, the towns they'd defended and the members of my increasingly messed up clan, but there is none of this here. For a game about roleplaying your own early medieval British dynasty, I felt extremely disconnected with my faction and it's characters: ignore the usual issue of forgetting who your heirs are, most the time I couldn't even remember my faction name without mousing over a settlement.
Character development and faction management feels worse: the skills tree has been replaced with a far messier looking retinue system and characters feel significantly less personal for it. Thrones of Britannia offers none of this, which is especially frustrating when a faction you know is going to attack you decides to and you're forced to concede land to them because that's how the settlements are set up. In Viking Invasion, you can opt to not even build a settlement at all and leave the region for farming or defence, and in Shogun II you can manage your food to have bustling economic centres at the heart of your clan's territories and strong troop production centres at the edges. The closest comparison to this game is either Medieval I's Viking Invasion or the base game version of Shogun II Total War- Viking invasion because it focuses on the same area a few centuries before, and Shogun II because it focuses on a race to the throne on a single island: in both cases, these games took advantage of their narrow scope and allowed for a great deal of depth and strategic planning to settlements. A market town will always be a market town and a church settlement will always be a church settlement. The issue with this is that it removes much of the variety the previous games afforded in building settlements. The closest the game gets to true innovation is to feature historically accurate settlements and structures on the map, such as churches, farming communities and towns in the state they were back in the period. Many features are either directly copied or dummied out versions of what we saw in Atilla. The narrow lack of breadth in the game (focusing solely on the British Isles in the latter half of the 9th Century AD) should have allowed for an immense amount of mechanical depth the likes of which Total War has never seen, but there is none of this here. Thrones of Britannia does not have this justification. This is especially irritating following my gripe with Warhammer I & II's campaigns being a little shallow: the justification in that case is that the races and factions featured in the game are so diverse and different from each other that many of the usual Total War campaign features wouldn't really work for many of them, and to develop specialised campaign mechanics that have the depth of Atilla for each faction would be a massive ask.
The problem with Thrones of Britannia is that it removes many previous features without bringing anything new or interesting to the table to replace them.
A TOTAL WAR SAGA THRONES OF BRITANNIA REVIEW SERIES
The central issue here is that the Total War series is one of incremental steps: as the games are released, certain aspects of the campaign and battle mechanics get modified, removed, dummied out etc. I normally spend a few weeks formulating an opinion on something before finally publishing my opinion, but Thrones of Britannia has left an extremely sour taste in my mouth, not least because I am an avid Total War fan and booked the day off work to play this. I'm not one to give kneejerk reviews to any products: I feel it's a little insulting given the amount of time a developer puts into a new I'm not one to give kneejerk reviews to any products: I feel it's a little insulting given the amount of time a developer puts into a new release.
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