In Legion Gold, you'll play the part of the leader of a nation-state during the height of the Roman era, when the legions of Caesar controlled the known world. You start out as the leader of either the Roman armies or one of the neighboring tribes as you attempt to build up your nation and fend off the opposition.

Legion Gold plays out on both a strategic and tactical level. The strategic level has you developing your economy while using diplomacy to bring other nation states to your side without bloodshed. At the tactical level, you command your troops on the battlefield as they face off against those that refuse your diplomatic advances. While the game's literature promises a rich experience on both levels, it actually tends to fall flat due to its reliance on simplicity over accuracy. The manual details many factors that affect your performance as both a governor and a general, but due to shallow implementation and a minimal sense of immersion, these factors don't really operate properly within the game.

In strategic mode, you'll build cities, recruit troops and work to convince your neighbors that you're really just a kindly old Caesar looking to work together with everyone. The problem here is that there's simply not enough detail to make this feel realistic in any way, shape or form. It's just a few clicks here and there to build structures, tax citizens and control diplomatic relations between nation-states. The Roman Empire was based on action, intrigue, and drama, yet sadly, the non-action components are completely ignored. There are no spies, no saboteurs and certainly nobody sneaking around plotting to overthrow your leadership. A major annoyance with the strategy/economic system is the incredibly picky storage allocation system. If you don't have enough storage, your food and supplies just go rotting in the street, which makes perfect sense, that is, until you realize that you have to constantly build storage structures. If you fail to allocate precious wartime resources to storage, you'll start losing the trust of the army and the citizens. If, however, you divert resources to storage, you'll find you have little gold left to build anything else in the early rounds of the game. This little catch-22 gets pretty obnoxious after a few games.

The tactical mode, in which you'll do all your fighting, is woefully simplistic, and will cause any true wargamer to pull all his hair out. Here's how it works: when you field your armies you'll need to choose formations for each group. The formations are historically accurate, but far too limited. They tend to be basic formations such as "checkerboard", "shallow mob" and "wedge." Next, you'll choose how they advance into the battle, using such simple orders as "Short advance, then Hold" and "Hold then Long Advance." Now that the formations and advances are chosen, it's time to fight, or is it? You see, once the armies are set in motion, all you can do is watch them duke it out. You have no control of who goes where once blood is spilled. And while your men are fighting, you'll watch even the sturdiest of soldiers retreat if his team starts to lose just a few troops. This is something Roman Legions simply did not do unless it was the most drastic of situations, yet in Legion Gold, the Roman Legionnaires will run like scared children the minute they get a skinned knee.

While I don't have it around any more for comparison, I'd swear that Centurion: Defender of Rome for the SEGA Genesis had more depth of gameplay, and I know the combat system was a darn sight better.

If a developer is going to re-release a game with more some new options and additional levels, you'd expect them to upgrade the graphics engine. Well, Legion Gold's developers (Slitherine) must have felt that was unnecessary since this game looks like something from the early days of Windows 95. There's very little visual appeal to Legion Gold, from the menus to the combatants, it's all unappealing,  and the giant buttons used throughout the game remind me of early web-based games.

There's nothing remarkable about Legion Gold's sound, it's just a collection of generic music and inane sound bites. The cheesy Latin phrases uttered by your commanders when you issue orders get irritating mighty quick. It's a Latin version of "aye aye Cap'n" that was apparently voice-acted by someone on-staff who figured he's use his best Italian accent and that would be "just fine." Combat sounds are culled from the "generic battle sounds" audio clipart CD's, which this game has convinced me must exist somewhere.

Replayability

There are dozens of historical and fantasy campaigns to play through, but frankly, after two or three, you'll be done with this game. The shallow gameplay, bottom-shelf graphics, horrible sound and lack of immersion guarantee you'll relegate Legion Gold to the "why did I buy that?" section of your game library.

Overall

When Legion hit the shelves a short while back, it was pretty much a complete letdown, with a shallow combat system, lifeless economics and all-around weak gameplay. Well, for whatever reason, the developers decided to ignore these weaknesses when putting out an updated game, which makes Legion Gold a carbon copy of everything that was wrong with the original Legion. There's nothing I would say that is great about this game, and there's no way I would recommend it to anyone, even the staunchest Roman history buff.