Review: CivCity Rome 3D simulation game

City builders are curiously addictive little games that cast the player in a role somewhere between a god and a civic town planner.

Skirting the obvious ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’ introductory gag, CivCity Rome is a direct descendant of games like SimCity but is, as you might imagine, set in Ancient Roman times.

CivCity’s interface is a straightforward ¾-angled view of your city with a simple point-n-click menu system along the left and bottom edges of the screen.

Starting with nothing but a little stone quarry in the middle of pre-Christian Italy, you must turn your initial collection of shacks and vagrants into a proud, shimmering pillar of the Roman Empire.

Trading and combat are involved as you extend your reach, but the focus is on earning money and keeping your population happy. Careful construction of amenities will ensure a cheerful, hard-working populous which, in turn, will allow you to research new technologies and advance your civilisation rating.

If all of that sounds a little familiar, that’s because setting a game of this type in Ancient Rome isn’t a particularly new idea.

The Caesar games, for example, have well and truly trodden this path already, and fans of this series may want to hold out for the long-awaited Caesar IV, due in the shops later in the year.

The Civilization series (which is said to have “inspired” CivCity) occupies a very similar space too, but offers an arguably much richer experience, given its focus on strategy and its epoch-spanning approach.

Without the elements that made Civilization’s gameplay seem so varied, CivCity does tend to get a little monotonous after a while.

Dedicated aficionados of the city-building genre or those with a particular historical interest in the era will probably love the attention to detail.

Otherwise, CivCity really has little that’s new or original on offer.

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