 |
| A bustling economy. |
There are a few other issues with the game that can be annoying. Events such
as fires or animal attacks will be announced to you verbally, but won’t be
marked on your mini map. It’s up to you to scroll around looking for the
problem. Also the mouse pointer is off when trying to select buildings. When you
want to select a particular building you need to click below it and to the
right. When you do select individual structures you get a cutaway view to the
interior that lets you watch what is going on and even lets you see if the
structure is lacking the requisite goods. You also get handy arrows that point
out the location of the citizens associated with the building. While these are
nice visual cues, overall the game suffers from a decided case of blandness. The
buildings are not that interesting to look at and are missing the grandeur and
aesthetics so important to Roman city builders. For example, temples for
different gods are virtually indistinguishable from one another and the scale
between buildings is not consistent.
The game’s tie-in to Civilization seems to consist entirely of three features
that feel almost tacked on to the game at the last minute. The first is the
inclusion of a Civlopedia, but this is not a very useful reference for the game
player or historically curious. The second is a tech tree that adds a research
component to the game. New technologies lead to bonuses that affect the
under-the-hood number crunching, but they don’t have an obvious impact on
gameplay. Lastly there are seven wonders which can be built in your cities. They
are a nice addition to the game and provide a nice bonus to your city’s
happiness, but they can seem oddly out of place in the patchwork urban
nightmares that you’ll construct while playing the game.
Overall CivCity: Rome is a pretty simplified city builder that is missing a
lot of the data, charts, and challenge found in the better city sim games. While
it is better than your typical bargain bin tycoon game, it certainly does not
live up to the Civilization legacy and will leave a lot of players disappointed.
In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated:
66%. CivCity: Rome fails to capture the glory of Rome or of the
Civilization series of games.
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