When Feral Interactive first brought Creative Assembly’s classic PC strategy title Rome: Total War ($9.99) to the iPad in November of 2016, there were inevitably many people who wished that they could play it on their iPhone too. Indeed the iPhone user base is way larger than the iPad user base and so it’s always frustrating to see a game release for the iPad only. However, in this particular case Rome is such a complex, menu-driven game that it seemed pretty impossible to get something that would work well on the much smaller screens of the iPhone series. But Feral was ready to take on that “impossible" challenge and answer the requests of their fans, and about a year after the iPad version’s release they officially announced their intent to create an iPhone version of Rome: Total War. Today, at long last, that iPhone version has been released in the App Store.
Of course that announcement of an iPhone version was nine months ago now, and I’m sure they were working on it even prior to that, which means that porting Rome to the iPhone was no small task. In fact Feral had to completely rethink many of the UI and menu interfaces in the game and create stuff specifically for use on the smaller iPhone screen. There are all sorts of iPhone-specific enhancements and features, as you can see in the update notes in the App Store description for this update. This is seriously, seriously impressive work. Best of all is that this is an update to the existing iPad version of Rome, so if you already bought it you’re getting Universal iPhone support for free. What’s more is that this update includes a ton of improvements for all players, not just iPhone folks, so really this is a big deal for all Rome fans.
There is no word yet on whether Android support or if the standalone expansions Alexander or Barbarian invasion will be getting the iPhone treatment, but Feral says they’ll let us know if there’s anything to announce on those fronts. For now, you can grab Rome: Total War for $9.99 whether you’re an iPhone player, and iPad player, or both, and you can find all sorts of discussion about the game in our forums.
