Even for the price, I did not enjoy my time.

I liked the vibe and the first mission drew me in somewhat but once I moved on from the tutorial I immediately lost the spark. Every mission has the same objective, kill some targets while sneaking around some patrolling guards, the only difference being the map. The gameplay boils down to; walk around slowly picking off guards using the assassinate button, walk around slowly shooting guards in the heads, and walk around killing pacified targets.

Unfortunately its a bit too bare-bones for me.
There are no movement mechanics, just fast and slow, standing and crouching, and the occasional crawling in a vent or similar. The stealth mechanics are just line of sight, light level, and sound from movement. You cannot jump or climb objects, nor press yourself up against a wall or piece of cover (There is a gif on the store page that shows wall hugging and leaning out from cover but I could not find the button for it using mouse and keyboard). There is also the very occasional and not useful hiding in a locker. There is a splintercell style visibility gauge but for some reason the only place you can get absolute zero on the gauge is in a vent, no matter how lit up it is in the vent, for instance in a map with no windows I shot out all the lights and still it was above zero.

I was getting so bored with the loop by the prison level that I just went as fast as I could as often as I could, assassinating when I could, or just nailing weak guards in the head. The alert radius of guards is quite easy to manage even when going loud with the assault gun to kill the helmeted guards. The enemy behaviour is quite basic, they do have a basic investigating status sometimes but its quite worthless. There is no incentive to keeping any guards alive and no scoring system and thus I went for a full clear basically every time. The game is strangely easier when going loud, pick off a couple easy ones with assassinate, then just start popping heads and if any armoured one shows up unload a magazine into them, rinse and repeat.

It leaves a lot to be desired if you expected anything like Splinter Cell which it tries to emulate. There are no gadgets, no use in information gathering, no movement mechanics like wall splits and climbing that make the original splinter cells so fun.

Alright first of all I got this game out of a humble bundle or something so I'm not gonna comment on the price.
Also this is only a review of the main singleplayer of the game, I had no interest in the multiplayer.

So my first thought while playing this game was "this just feels like a tech demo with a story slapped on" and I could have been right since it was a xbox one launch title so they had a strict deadline for this game, but as I played the game more and more I realised just how wrong it all felt. You never felt like you were playing some sort of roman commander, you had a shield in your hand yet you could never raise it, and you were never on a real battlefield just disconnected little roads and trails like all the wars were happening elsewhere.

You get to the point in the game where you get to go into a gladiator pit, namely "The Colosseum" and that's when it hit me, this game finally felt right. I understood why you could never raise your shield, I understood why you would parry and roll around and I understood why all the shield wall manoeuvers felt like ♥♥♥♥ and I understand why all the defense tactic situations were so shallow. It felt like this game was meant to be a little gladiator game. As soon as you finished a section in the gladiator arena your character would raise his arms to recieve the applause of the crowd which was completely uncharictaristic for Marius especially at the current time in the story. No matter how much this guy is trying to pass himself off as a gladiator he would definitely be too sullen to bask in the applause in the colosseum. It just felt like they made all the colosseum stuff first and then were tasked to make a roman soldier story but the gladiator bits were the best bit so they just pieced it together around that. That being said, there is so little of the gladiator bit that it could in no way make the game better.

Now that I've expressed the main gripes about how the game feels lets talk about how it plays. In one word I would say: poorly. The controls are unintuitive, I found myself often shield bashing instead of parrying (full disclaimer: I played with a controller 'cos i believe 3rd person games are better with a controller plus it was originally a Xbone original so yeah) and the camera never adjusted itself, so when youre trying to roll around a couple of enemies youre also buying time to turn your camera just so you can see all the guys around you because the camera was right behind your shoulder. This paired with the lack of a lock on feature made it so that you were constantly attacking the wrong enemy. The pila throwing is so slow and clunky I dont even know why they put it there but when you got distance you can just one shot any easy enemies with them so it takes what little gameplay there was away.

So the combat is obviously plagued with the bad controls but also with bad mechanics, there is never more than about three dude on you at once and you are never locked into animations except with some parts of the heavy attacks, so you can just parry whilst you were mid swing and get an immediate response. This made the combat far too easy, I played the game on the hardest difficulty available when i booted it up and it was laughably easy. The game only got difficult when it threw multiple enemies at you at the same time that could only be harmed after you had parried or dodged their "unblockables". Thats artificial difficulty in its raw form. Sadly the "bosses" are just these "unblockable" enemies turned up to 10, which made the boss fights devolve into either dodging the last attack in their chain and getting 2 hits in or perfect parrying the last hit in their chain and getting 3 hits in. Thats right, unblockables arent actually unblockable, you just have to parry at the last second instead of the lenient 2 seconds before it hits, which would be a good mechanic if parrying wasnt so easy.

The enemy designs are also uninspired, they can all be summed up in a line.
Weak axe dude
Shield dude
Weak axe dude with unblockable
Big axe dude with unblockables
Duel sword dude with unblockable
Praetorian wankers
Weak Praetorian wankers
and the bosses are just one of these enemy types respectively, but stronger.

This part ain't spoiler free.
Now to the story. It's very clichéd (had to copy paste that 'e') to say the least. It's predictable in almost every way. You immediately saw the fathers death coming as soon as they greeted each other and when it did happen you saw it was a roman sword. Now the roman sword wasnt clue enough when all the other barbarians were using axes so the put a little snake emblem on the sword just so you wouldnt be lost and from then on the story just falls infront of you. All the events happen very non-surprisingly like the game just saying "yeah you knew this was coming", but the funniest part is when Marius himself sees the emperors son kill king Oswald, Marius just blantantly says the emperor killed his dad in the dumbest way. I feel the supernatural parts of the story could have been completely left out as well, summer appears in the start of the game but its like, "is that just a vision or are there actual gods and ♥♥♥♥". Another thing about the gods is they keep refering to greek gods instead of roman ones and i think the only dude that doesnt is your general but he dies too but you see it coming a mile away. The game would have been more interesting if he turned out to be the villain but eh, whatever. On the topic of villain, the emperors sons are the most shallow and lame villains, they are immediately unlikable and you can see straight through them, they are wafer thin so to say. Also the part in the north forest when they try to build tension with all the soldiers getting scared was unintentionally funny, I felt no threat in the game so far so I wasnt gonna get scared at some shadows in the dark. But the best part of the forrest bit was that I was taking the shortest route around bends and was walking as fast as i could so all the soldiers' speaking queues had almost no gap between them giving you no time to take in any silence there would have been.

Alright thats just about all the issues with the game a couple more are the linearity of it all, no choices in paths you take, the only branching pathes are dead ends with collectables so there is absolutely no replayability. The game is way too short and I think it was marketed as a triple A game so that really is quite ♥♥♥♥, I blew through it in like 4 hours and immediately uninstalled it. Also they try to make your armour and shield and stuff all sleek and modern or something and it really clashes with the historical setting and just looks really dumb, and they replace almost all roman symbols with their simplistic eagle design which was also a poor move because it looked pretty stupid.

All in all the graphics are all that is good about this game but it isnt the worst game ever, it checks all the boxes to make it the bare minimum of a game. 2/5

Fun game to play if you don't have a short fuse.