The biggest problem with the game is not its military or religious issues,
but rather its interface. The game uses a pop-up menu system that is overlayed
on the city view portion of the screen. It can be pretty tricky trying to get
the camera into a position where you can see the spot into which you are trying
to squeeze in a building. Also, the buildings themselves can be trying to place
because the controls to rotate a structure before placing it are a little tricky
to use. More often than not, I had to delete and then reposition a structure
after rotating it because the game has an annoying habit of plopping a building
down as you’re rotating it. Lastly the game has some real issues with its
road/walls/aqueduct placement algorithm. Walls and aqueducts are especially
problematic as the game has difficulty aligning corners and making turns and
bends.
Caesar IV is played as a series of scenarios that start you off with small and
simple towns in confined spaces to much larger cities with complex economies.
The scenarios are all pretty enjoyable and well-designed, but the game is
missing a wide-open sandbox mode. SimCity 4 shipped several years ago featuring
large interconnected maps so it’s surprising that Caesar IV is a throwback to
older style city sims. Caesar IV does include a scenario editor so you can at
least add more play to the game beyond the scenarios that it ships with, but
this is an “unsupported” feature (i.e. it crashes to the desktop with annoying
regularity). Caesar IV is innovative in its support of online play. This takes
the form of what amounts to a leaderboard system. There are a series of
challenge scenarios for you to compete in and then upload your scores for
comparison to other players’ scores. There’s also a persistent empire mode in
which you upload the cities you’re built. The more cities you upload, the
greater your empire which you can compare to those of other players.
Overall Caesar IV is enjoyable, but the interface will annoy you throughout your
career as a Roman politician. Clean up the interface, fix the road/wall/aqueduct
placement issues, toss the combat, and provide an open sandbox mode and you may
just have a classic game for the ages.
In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated:
72%. Caesar IV is at its heart an enjoyable game, but you’ll need to
be willing to put up with a fair amount of frustration.
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