Reviewed: August 15, 2006
Reviewed by: Jeff Gedgaud

Publisher
2K Games

Developer
Firefly Studios
Firaxis

Released: July 24, 2006
Genre: Simulation
Players: 1
ESRB: Everyone

7
7
6
8
7.0

System Requirements

You control the placement of buildings, trading, military strength and entertainment for your citizens to keep them happy and healthy in your city. You need not worry about many of the complex things that the Civilization series has been famous for as this city builder is more of a simplified city builder. I have to warn you though; CivCity: Rome can be quite an addicting game with its easy to use interface and gameplay but challenging mix trying to keeping your citizens content.

CivCity: Rome is based on the popular Sid Meier’s Civilization games but is much more of a simplified version with many of the detailed features left out. That doesn’t mean it can’t be fun as well as challenging. You can start out on the campaign, which is more like a tutorial at the beginning, and then the missions get more difficult and longer.

The campaign is a good place to start learning what your citizens need in order to keep them happy and functioning in your new town. Each mission has some simple objectives that are accomplished by having your town grow and prosper. Later missions will have you using more of the CivCity’s features to accomplish the more complex objectives that will also take longer in game time.

There are also some single games not linked to others to play with objectives that are long range in scope. The objectives can be things like protecting your going concern from outside attacks or just not having to ask for more money from daddy, or Rome to be exact. The gameplay is rather easy to accomplish but the objectives can be quite hard to accomplish at times.

Along with the objectives you have many missions where you are trying to beat the clock. You not only have to feed and house your people but research technology just like the sundial. In the game you do have a month and year clock because many missions have time limits that you need to accomplish your objectives by.

Along with the single missions and the campaign you get to try your hand at creating your very own world with no rules of nature and make the land as easy or as hard to conquer as you like. It’s one thing to have the land nice and flat with all the resources at hand but how about having things spread out over many miles or maybe in very mountainous lands. Once you have created the land with features to your liking you get to add the objectives and any sudden events to your mission like attacks from man and beast or wildfires.

Placing dwellings, farms or other constructions during gameplay has to be done with the idea that the lower levels of citizens do not want to travel far to get all the things they need. You need to place things close to them that they need but later on with the addition of roads and the wheel they will be able to travel further but this range of available needs makes for your limit in placement. This is the basis of gaining better levels of civilization in the first stages of CivCity, later adding things to keep people happy becomes a necessity for you to keep an eye on.

There are some helpful pages of information in the form of graphs and charts to show you the happiness of your people as well as their progress. Using the information on these you can quickly see what your citizens are unhappy about and the type of additions your people want to help them attain happiness.

The textures and animations look good but sometimes people do walk through things on their busy way. The games menus and interface look very good with easy to see and understand pages of information about the health and welfare of your settlement.

CivCity: Rome has the usual graphics controls to set video, graphics and other settings according to your likes and computer. I saw no graphical glitches or problems with graphics during gameplay with only some minor pausing in the games intro movie.

I noticed some glitching in the form of pauses or skipping in the intro movies along with the graphics but nothing in the way of problems during gameplay. They have added some good background sounds as well as the music and created a good well-rounded city building game.

They only have settings for your sound setup on your computer with things like narration, music and background volume. There are no other settings for sound but with the simple kind of sound setup in a city building game you would not need anything more.

I like the way the way CivCity: Rome has simplified the city building and daily life into some easily accomplished requirements to keep your people happy. I have read some other reviews and seen how some people really like the simplicity of the building and civilization setup while others say it is too simple. Without the complexities of the other civilization builders CivCity keeps things simple while still having enough challenges to make the game fun.

You get to play through the campaign and the single missions with a wide variety of tactics to accomplish the same goals at your disposal. During gameplay you can try your hand at better-looking city life with the needed additions of the gardens and other splendor you place.

You can also try your hand at creating your own world as large as you want with the included editor. Its fun to keep the riffraff out by encompassing your city in rough mountains or you can make it rough on yourself by allowing all those hordes in from the surrounding countries.

CivCity is still a challenge with its need for research and hierarchy of levels in trying to attain certain degrees of civilization. For those looking for an easy to play yet fun and challenging city builder without all the complexities that can be added into a civilization builder CivCity: Rome is a good overall game.