A Total War Saga: TROY

The biggest giveaway the series ever had

A Total War Saga: TROY launched in an unusual way for a mainline Creative Assembly release: not on Steam, but exclusively on the Epic Games Store, free to keep permanently for its first 24 hours on 13 August 2020. It worked spectacularly by the giveaway's own metric — 7.5 million people claimed it, one of the largest free-game promotions in gaming history at that point, putting a Total War game in front of an audience the premium-priced series had never reached at that scale. The game itself takes the series' turn-based empire management and real-time battles into Bronze Age Greece, letting you lead Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, Paris, Aeneas and other figures from the Iliad through campaigns blending historical strategy with the mythological texture of Homer's poem.

Critics who covered that 2020 launch were reasonably positive: 75 on Metacritic, 62 on OpenCritic where it lands in the "Strong" tier. Reviewers generally liked the fresh setting and found the core loop intact, even if some noted TROY as a somewhat lighter, more accessible entry than the series' heaviest historical titles.

A different story a year later, on Steam

TROY's Epic Games Store exclusivity ran for exactly one year, and the game arrived on Steam in September 2021 — which is where the bulk of this game's Steam review history, and its most consistent complaint, actually begins. The single most-upvoted review in this piece's negative sample, posted the same week as the Steam launch, doesn't discuss combat or strategy at all: "Feels like half of all your selections to make are locked behind paywalls. Why? Just why?"

That complaint has numbers behind it. On top of the NZ$64.95 base game, TROY's post-launch content includes three separate character-faction DLC packs (Rhesus & Memnon, Ajax & Diomedes, and Amazons) at NZ$14.99 each, a full NZ$41.99 fantasy-mode expansion called MYTHOS, and — the detail multiple reviews single out as the most pointed example of the pattern — a NZ$4.49 "Blood & Glory" pack that charges separately for gore in a war game. "I need to pay extra for blood in a war game... what?" reads one representative review. Add everything up and TROY's full content stack comfortably exceeds NZ$170, against a base game several reviewers describe, in one reviewer's words, as "60% of the game" you were expecting.

Mythos versus history, and what long-time fans wanted instead

The MYTHOS expansion, which adds recruitable mythological creatures and a refreshed campaign map alongside a genuinely fantastical spin on the setting, drew a specific and split reaction. Creative Assembly also released a free Historical Mode alongside it, aimed at players who wanted TROY closer to the series' grounded, non-fantasy roots — removing passive divine buffs and adding features like leader bodyguards that the base "Truth Behind the Myth" mode lacked. Several long-time fans welcomed the option but felt the free Historical Mode read as an afterthought relative to the resources put into the paid fantasy content: reviewers in community discussion argued Creative Assembly should either have committed fully to Mythos from the start, or fully resourced the historical experience as the main product rather than treating it as the free side dish to a paid expansion.

Beyond the monetisation debate, a smaller but recurring critique from veteran players concerns the series' core AI. "TW has a fundamental problem: The AI hasn't really evolved... Creative Assembly's solution for this is to make the game harder (and less realistic) but not more challenging," reads one detailed review from a player with nearly 28,000 minutes logged — a complaint less specific to TROY than to where the long-running series was, in that reviewer's assessment, in 2022.

Verdict

A Total War Saga: TROY is a reasonably well-received strategy game wrapped in one of the more aggressive DLC structures this review series has covered — not predatory in the free-to-play sense, since everything is a straightforward one-time purchase, but a base game whose most-repeated Steam complaint is specifically about how much of the promised Iliad roster and content sits behind separate paid packs. The core turn-based-and-battles loop that defines Total War is present and functional, and critics at the original 2020 launch rated it fairly on those terms. Anyone buying it in 2026 should budget accordingly: treat the NZ$64.95 base price as a starting point, not the full picture, and decide in advance how much of Bronze Age Greece you're actually willing to pay for piece by piece.