A well-made strategy game reminds us of a season of Survivor, requiring a player to struggle, conquer, bargain, backstab, and dominate until all resistance has been removed. Rome: Total War, published for the Mac by Feral Interactive, certainly fits that bill--only instead of eating bugs for a million dollars, all you have to do is conquer the world.

Always defend a newly captured city--no matter the cost.

Set at the beginning of the Roman Empire, Total War lets you take command of one of the three great Roman houses of the era, working to expand your influence from one capital city to a full-fledged empire. The game combines old-school turn-based mechanics with real-time strategy, so you’ll get pleasantly lost in the many challenges of upgrading your cities, constructing essential facilities to keep your population happy, recruiting troops for your military, and advancing technologies to build more powerful units to use against your enemies. You can also make deals by sending diplomats to neighboring nations to hear their terms while presenting your own demands in return. If you’re not feeling very diplomatic or you just want a quicker line on what your opponents are doing, send spies to collect data on a nearby army’s forces or technologies an enemy has mastered. Your assassins can even attempt to murder an enemy leader or destroy a critical facility in a nearby town. It all spins together into a web of intrigue that’s fascinating to play through.

When it’s time to just brawl, though, Total War’s unique battle system lets you manage skirmishes in real-time 3D, moving your camera to an optimal angle, zooming in and out smoothly, and giving orders to individual units. Tactics make a difference, and you can salvage a seemingly unwinnable battle by flanking an enemy from the sides or killing your opponent’s general to destroy morale.

Between the excellent voice acting, lush environments, lively music, and reliable multiplayer over GameRanger and LAN connections, there’s an attention to detail in Total War that’s hard to miss. Sure, we encountered some minor bugs in the menu layout during the introduction, and the game crashed once under Mac OS 10.6.2. But the experience was otherwise smooth, and the blend of expected strategy elements with an epic story and presentation rocks. After all, when attacking a city feels like the battle scenes in Return of the King, you’re in for an interesting hour.

For its $30 price tag, Total War delivers a strategy experience that's hard to pass up. And maybe its novel fireball-hurling catapults will make a cameo appearance on the next season of Survivor.

Rome: Total War
COMPANY: Feral Interactive
CONTACT: www.feralinteractive.com
PRICE: $30
REQUIREMENTS: 1.6GHz or faster PowerPC or Intel processor, Mac OS 10.5 or later, 512MB of RAM, ATI or Nvidia graphics card with 64MB of VRAM, 4.5GB free disk space
Good presentation. Incredibly fun battle sequences and strategic elements. Consistent multiplayer functionality. ESRB rating: Teen.
In-game camera could use additional flexibility. AI units prone to bottlenecks during battles.