In new open world game Lost Legions you are a Roman "rebuilding the empire" behind enemy lines
The announcement trailer for Lost Legions opens with a Roman Emperor bellowing “GIVE ME BACK MY LEGIONS” like a kid who’s just had his pudding taken away. I'd just had a big swig of coffee before watching, and was instantly swept off by visions of an apoplectic Roman bigwig rampaging through the forests of darkest Germania, gluing abducted legionnaires together into a sort of Octavian katamari... and then they revealed that it’s another open world survival game, with no less than two trailer beats dedicated to the act of hacking down a tree.
I mean no disrespect to developers Tarock Interactive - they're not to blame for my addled imagination - but there are many open world survival games and as a weary Ed Thorn recently noted, the majority are heavily frontloaded with wilderness carpentry. I don’t think survival games should emphasise wood-chopping in their announcement footage. It's like doing a Call of Duty montage of people getting shot three seconds from spawn. Still, if there's no katamari mechanic, the idea of raising a small army of mostly AI-controlled Roman soldiers behind enemy lines has a certain charm. Without further ado, here’s the trailer.
Lost Legions is set in a world inspired by the Teutoburg Forest in Germany, and takes place following what is known as the Varian Disaster, in which an alliance of tribes cornered and butchered three Roman legions using Roman military tactics – a humiliating end to a period of expansion under the Emperor Augustus, who is the guy yelling in the trailer.
You play one of the scattered legionnaires. Base construction and gear crafting aside, your objective is to recover each legion’s banner to restore Rome’s honour, but between you and that goal stand barbarian tribes, ferocious beasts and hints of supernatural activity. Is this actual supernature, though, or just the usual thing where it turns out to be dudes in paint wearing skull hats?
The game supports 1-4 person multiplayer, which doesn’t seem consistent
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