CivCity: Rome (PC) Review
Jul. 26th, 2007 11:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
demonicgerbilLJ cut for your pleasure.
Take Caesar 2, make it prettier, and you have CivCity: Rome.
So what is the game all about? Building Roman Cities in a variety of circumstances, proceeding from easier to more difficult ones. Your role as the city's governor lets you control what goods are produced, where they're produced at, how water is distributed, and even matters of defense in some scenarios which feature hostile forces.
The interface of the game is fairly simple, and the excellently crafted tutorial missions walk you through the intricacies of using it. The main 'campaign' is a series of missions which introduce gradually more difficult goals to accomplish. The primary means of interacting with the world is by laying down new buildings and bringing up the status displays for already existing ones.
There are a large number of buildings which can be placed on the map, but the most important is likely the placing of houses. Houses at their lowest level can exist separate from water sources, food, or various luxuries. As a city develops and more and more resources become available, a house upgrades itself, producing more taxes so on - but only so long as the house has access to various resources. If a house can not get food, for example, it will never upgrade, and if it goes without long enough it will downgrade. Eventually housing can upgrade to an insula, which is an apartment over a store - and which you'll have to place manually when it happens.
Then there are the resource producing buildings. You can build structures to harvest wood from a forest, or quarry stone, both resources which will eventually run out. There are farms, first the basic goat farm, then flax and olive farms. The farms and such provide the raw materials which other buildings turn into resources for your population; goats provide meat at a butcher's shop, grapes provide wine, and so on.
There are other structures which can be placed. Taverns and such for entertainment, schools for education, roads to travel over, watch towers to protect the people, aqueducts, and so on.
This massive web of resources is needed in order to improve houses. Often the scenario's requirements involve producing a number of dwellings of sufficient level. Other requirements can involve trading a certain amount of a good to another city, or putting out fires. There's also an ability to research technologies and build a legion to defend your city, but those are rather secondary compared with the building of the city itself.
The requirements to advance to the next scenario can be maddening. I can't tell you how long I spent just shy of meeting a housing requirement because I'd misjudged a distance by one or two squares of ground. It gets frustrating, and ultimately that experience has turned me off from the game despite its charms.
Now for a quick scoring summary for those of you keeping track of the numbers:
Gameplay: 7
Pretty good, very Caesar 2 or SimCity. It's a lot of fun, fairly balanced, and easy to pick up and play. Requirements for some things seem a little too strict, but your taste may vary from mine.
Graphics: 8
CivCity: Rome is very easy on the eyes. The city, the people, all are modeled well enough to look at without straining. You can even see how well a dwelling or store is doing with its stock of goods from visual inspection. Not having to bring up an information panel is a definite plus.
Sound: 3
I honestly can't say I remember there even being music in the game, so it must not have been memorable at all. Sound effects were likewise not a major contributor. Also, the fact that all these 'Romans' were speaking with British accents irked me to no end...
Replay: 5
I didn't find that it was very replayable. My personal experience with the way the game went meant that after a certain point I just didn't feel like playing it anymore. Not being able to finish a mission without knocking my entire city down and starting over because I placed a building one square too far over was ridiculous. But for someone with more attention to detail, I'm sure this wouldn't be such a great problem. There's certainly a lot of city-building gameplay to be had.
Other: N/A
The game had an issue with my widescreen monitor where my interaction with the city didn't match up to where the cursor was on the screen. At least I think it was my playing in widescreen. I don't have a regular monitor to check it against... Maybe this has been fixed in a patch? I can't say.
Overall: 6
CivCity: Rome is a fun game if you like city building, or Roman-themed games, or especially if you like both. It's not quite the holy grail that Caesar 2 was in its day, but CivCity: Rome is much prettier and offers somewhat different gameplay with the management of goods and resources flowing through your city. It's worth a look, and worth a play.
Take Caesar 2, make it prettier, and you have CivCity: Rome.
So what is the game all about? Building Roman Cities in a variety of circumstances, proceeding from easier to more difficult ones. Your role as the city's governor lets you control what goods are produced, where they're produced at, how water is distributed, and even matters of defense in some scenarios which feature hostile forces.
The interface of the game is fairly simple, and the excellently crafted tutorial missions walk you through the intricacies of using it. The main 'campaign' is a series of missions which introduce gradually more difficult goals to accomplish. The primary means of interacting with the world is by laying down new buildings and bringing up the status displays for already existing ones.
There are a large number of buildings which can be placed on the map, but the most important is likely the placing of houses. Houses at their lowest level can exist separate from water sources, food, or various luxuries. As a city develops and more and more resources become available, a house upgrades itself, producing more taxes so on - but only so long as the house has access to various resources. If a house can not get food, for example, it will never upgrade, and if it goes without long enough it will downgrade. Eventually housing can upgrade to an insula, which is an apartment over a store - and which you'll have to place manually when it happens.
Then there are the resource producing buildings. You can build structures to harvest wood from a forest, or quarry stone, both resources which will eventually run out. There are farms, first the basic goat farm, then flax and olive farms. The farms and such provide the raw materials which other buildings turn into resources for your population; goats provide meat at a butcher's shop, grapes provide wine, and so on.
There are other structures which can be placed. Taverns and such for entertainment, schools for education, roads to travel over, watch towers to protect the people, aqueducts, and so on.
This massive web of resources is needed in order to improve houses. Often the scenario's requirements involve producing a number of dwellings of sufficient level. Other requirements can involve trading a certain amount of a good to another city, or putting out fires. There's also an ability to research technologies and build a legion to defend your city, but those are rather secondary compared with the building of the city itself.
The requirements to advance to the next scenario can be maddening. I can't tell you how long I spent just shy of meeting a housing requirement because I'd misjudged a distance by one or two squares of ground. It gets frustrating, and ultimately that experience has turned me off from the game despite its charms.
Now for a quick scoring summary for those of you keeping track of the numbers:
Gameplay: 7
Pretty good, very Caesar 2 or SimCity. It's a lot of fun, fairly balanced, and easy to pick up and play. Requirements for some things seem a little too strict, but your taste may vary from mine.
Graphics: 8
CivCity: Rome is very easy on the eyes. The city, the people, all are modeled well enough to look at without straining. You can even see how well a dwelling or store is doing with its stock of goods from visual inspection. Not having to bring up an information panel is a definite plus.
Sound: 3
I honestly can't say I remember there even being music in the game, so it must not have been memorable at all. Sound effects were likewise not a major contributor. Also, the fact that all these 'Romans' were speaking with British accents irked me to no end...
Replay: 5
I didn't find that it was very replayable. My personal experience with the way the game went meant that after a certain point I just didn't feel like playing it anymore. Not being able to finish a mission without knocking my entire city down and starting over because I placed a building one square too far over was ridiculous. But for someone with more attention to detail, I'm sure this wouldn't be such a great problem. There's certainly a lot of city-building gameplay to be had.
Other: N/A
The game had an issue with my widescreen monitor where my interaction with the city didn't match up to where the cursor was on the screen. At least I think it was my playing in widescreen. I don't have a regular monitor to check it against... Maybe this has been fixed in a patch? I can't say.
Overall: 6
CivCity: Rome is a fun game if you like city building, or Roman-themed games, or especially if you like both. It's not quite the holy grail that Caesar 2 was in its day, but CivCity: Rome is much prettier and offers somewhat different gameplay with the management of goods and resources flowing through your city. It's worth a look, and worth a play.