58 BC. Gaul.

Rome is still a Republic. Driven off their land by Germanic tribes, the Helvetii move west as an entire people, and the provincial governor Gaius Julius Caesar takes that migration as his pretext, puts his legions on the road and crosses the Alps. You are a nameless ranker in that column: Marcus of the Tenth Legion.

War is normally recorded on the map a commander looks down at. This game plays out at one point on that map, at spear height, for eight years. It opens on the first pitched battle against the Helvetii and runs through the crossing to Britain, the ambush of the Eburones and the double siege lines at Alesia. After the Rubicon it carries on into the civil war, to Pharsalus and Thapsus. It follows the ground the campaign actually covered and the people who actually left their names on it, and closes out across eight chapters and an epilogue.

No turn to wait for

There are no turns. A single click or tap is your movement and your strike. That is the whole control scheme, but what you are holding and which skills you bolted into your slots decide whether you live.

• Skills and passives: put the active skills you unlock by level into your slots, and swap passives to match what is lined up against you.

• Loot, affixes and runes: the affixes on your weapon and armor are your build. If the roll comes out weak, runes roll it again.

• Hunting elites: elites carry titles minted from their own affixes and own the field. An orange nameplate is a warning.

• Quickslots 1 to 8: hang your potions and consumables there in advance and you never take your hand off the fight.

• Five difficulty tiers: from a Normal that follows the story up to Torment, where the top-grade legendaries drop. Difficulty is recorded for each campaign separately.

The column does not stand alone

Companions cross the campaign with Marcus. The Gaul Cenobara, his comrade Varo and others fall in, each carrying their own stake and their own grudge. Hand your gear down to them and the line holds that much longer.

You move with the campaign

• From the temperate forests of Gaul you cross to a fog-bound Britain, winter out on the Germanic frontier, then push through Italy, Greece and Hispania to North Africa.

• Every chapter rebuilds its plants, its architecture and its light for that latitude: cypress and olive on the Mediterranean, palms at Thapsus, snow lying over Atuatuca.

• A cinematic opening and ending, chapter title cards and fully voiced dialogue drive the campaign forward. Korean, English and Spanish are all recorded in full, 880 spoken lines each.

Gold turns into fighting strength

The gold you take off the field goes into reforging, gambling and quartermaster perks. What you reroll and what you hoard is your odds in the next fight.

It runs on old hardware

Low-poly 3D under a cinematic color grade. It is built on the GL Compatibility renderer, so the framerate holds on integrated graphics and older machines. It was designed from the start around click and tap as the only input, so you can march the whole campaign one-handed.

The ending is already on record. What you have never done is stand in the mud of it.