ROME: Total War - Barbarian Invasion is now available on iPhone

Sega and Feral Interactive have today released an update for the, previously iPad and PC exclusive, standalone expansion to Creative Assembly's 2004 ROME: Total War. ROME: Total War - Barbarian Invasion covers the decline of the Roman Empire as they are consumed by various barbarian factions.

Total War games, for the uninformed, are strategy titles which feature real-time combat as well as turn-based nation management. The combat is more focused on military groupings (a la Warhammer) than individual soldiers, which allows things like formation and morale to play important roles in combat.

Subscribe to Pocket Gamer on

The standalone expansion allows players to control one of 18 factions, each one playing differently be that through units or starting map position. It's a lot of content for £/$4.99, and of all of the historic RTS series to make their way to mobile handsets it always confounds me that it's a series notorious for featuring large-scale combat with thousands of units on screen at once.

ROME: Total War - Barbarian Invasion was previously available for the iPad, however this update to the game now allows it to also run on iPhone 5Ss or later, including the iPod Touch 6th Generation. They'll require iOS 12, and 4GB of free space to install. As it's an update to the app, making it a universal one, if you already own the iPad version you'll already own the iPhone compatible one.

• We reviewed ROME: Total War - Barbarian Invasion when it first launched for iPad in 2017 and awarded it a Bronze Rating

As for Android versions. ROME: Total War launched onto Android devices last year, two years after it made its mobile debut for iOS. Barbarian Invasion only took a further year before its release for iPad in 2017, which means that it's taken two years for the smaller-screen version to release on iPhones. Luckily for Android users, they don't have to wait long for their turn, there's currently a targeted release of June 2019 for it.