Creative Assembly unveil giant Total War: Rome II panorama

Creative Assembly have revealed an enormous battle scene from their upcoming historical strategy epic Total War: Rome II (or possibly Rome: Total War II, or even Total Rome: War II - it's hard to keep track). Well whatever it's called, the game will boast what the developers are describing as "the biggest city – indeed the biggest battle – we've ever created in a Total War game". History fans, they're talking about the Siege of Carthage .

That image up there is just a slice of the full panorama , which is a lovely thing to behold, zoom in and explore. You can see cannons mid-fling, and soldiers mid-fall, as the city of Carthage is sacked and obliterated before your eyes. Frustratingly, we won't get to enact this battle ourselves until 2013, so in the meantime I'm going to photoshop in a mouse cursor and pretend I'm playing it right now . Don't judge me. War: Total Rome: No Place Like Rome II is due out in October next year.

Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.