Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned from video games. For example, in the ancient world, the Romans were the only culture that knew how to build cities. It’s true. How else can you explain the rash of Roman themed city builders we’ve had to contend with?
Glory of the Roman Empire is yet another take on what’s becoming an overly familiar theme.
See Lucius Go! Go Lucius Go!
A good amount of enjoyment can be had from games where you boss little people around and look on as they toil away at whatever menial task they’ve been given. That’s Glory of the Roman Empire in a nutshell. It’s a fairly basic city builder that relies heavily on the gathering, distribution, and use of a variety of resources.
Each mission in the campaign asks the player to build up or manage a city in the Roman Empire. As far as individual challenges go, the usual suspects are all present and accounted for. You’ll encounter and eventually overcome famine, disease, fire, and unruly barbarians. All the while you’ll strive to improve the lot of your townspeople.
See Gaius Build! Build Gaius Build!
The act of building your city falls on your people who are divided into slaves and regular citizens. Slaves do all of the dirty work. Commission a bakery to be built and they’ll wander off to gather the appropriate resources (clay, lumber, stone) and carry them over to the build site where your slave builder is hammering away. Once built, slaves will automatically make sure the bakery is supplied with adequate amounts of flour and will carry freshly baked bread off to be distributed to the citizens. And so it goes for every single building on the map. It looks like back breaking work, but hey, they’re slaves, right?
Your citizens, both male and female, are employed to do various jobs, like farming, mining, and creating the goods that make life a little more sunny (like food, clothes, and wine). Each of your citizens will divide their time between doing their job and fulfilling their needs. Because all of this happens in real-time on the screen, you spend a good amount of the game simply watching your little people as they mill about doing their thing.
See Cassius Click! Click Cassius Click!
The basics of Glory of the Roman Empire work fine, but as the player attempts to delve deeper into the game, cracks begin to appear in the façade. While the interface works well, especially the build menu which is tied to the right mouse button, there’s a suspicious lack of important information. It’s not missing so much as hidden in bland tables or buried in the properties of some building. To find out if the needs of your people are being met, you need to click on the tavern and click on the gossip tab. That wouldn’t be so bad apart from the fact that the visuals, while pleasing, are amazingly nondescript. Is that brown building a bakery or a butcher shop? Is that a trading post or a clay pit? Zooming down to street level obviously helps, but the homogenous look of the architecture makes it hard to manage your city efficiently.
There are other things that don’t make a lot of sense. Citizens will often complain that they don’t have enough of a certain resource. There’s a nice little button on the citizen panel that lets you force your citizen to go tend to his needs, but it’s often grayed out for no apparent reason. We had on man who was deathly ill and needed to go to the herbalist, yet he wouldn’t go despite being right next to one that was fully functional. The inclusion of a day/night cycle is also puzzling as citizens don’t appear to follow it at all.
Perhaps Rome was built in a day
Even with these problems, you’ll likely breeze through the game. Glory of the Roman Empire is a fairly simple game that offers little challenge once you understand the basics. Yet it’s still charming in its own right. Perfect for whittling away the hours before the next big release.
Article by: Greg Bemis
Video produced by: Michael Leffler
