The fame of the Roman Empire is reminiscent of the famous Caesar and is a classic city planner who takes the Roman Empire as a context. You freely place buildings and businesses on the map to meet the needs of your people. Houses, production centers (farms, sawmills, quarries, etc.), care or protection from fire, barracks, leisure - every building has an area of activity. It is therefore necessary to arrange them so that they have the best possible impact on each district, so that, for example, the butcher or the bakery take care of an entire block, the herbalism treats the surrounding patients, and so on. Once constructed, the buildings will need materials to keep them from falling into disrepair and catching fire, which could tire the poor prefects who are supposed to fight fires and civil unrest. Since the citizens of your city are only satisfied with reputable jobs and you are obliged to take into account the gender of your citizens, since men and women do not occupy the same positions, you need a lot of slaves from Rome. You are doing these ungrateful tasks. They are the ones who erect the buildings, maintain them and move the raw materials, especially from farms to shops, where they are converted into everyday consumer goods (flour in bread, linen in cloth, etc.). The management of slaves is essential as it helps to streamline your economy and thus ensure the happiness of your Romans. Without a sufficient workforce for the movement of goods, you risk shortages and turmoil.

Warehouses help you transport goods from one end of the map to the other and facilitate their circulation, and you constantly learn the needs of your citizens in taverns or places of worship. The game also features some graphics to help you determine supply and demand. Thanks to the temples and altars, you can develop huts into opulent mansions and turn your village into a prestigious city, obviously accompanied by more advanced cultural and leisure needs. Once the most beautiful temples, amphitheaters and other academies are built, the game becomes a little short. Of course, Rome requires gold to supply you with slaves, which sometimes requires you to set up trading posts there and exchange olive oil or wine for precious metal. You have no control over the battles. It boils down to building a barracks, supplying your troops with weapons, and then with a single click on the interface, sending your army to attack or enslave a barbarian village. The game is therefore very simple in many ways, and if you enjoy building a small town for a while, seduced by the beautiful and sometimes subtle gameplay, Glory of the Roman Empire very quickly reaches its limits. The game quickly becomes repetitive.

Aside from expanding the city and constructing the most advanced buildings, which is, after all, the accepted rule of the city builder, it lacks serious limitations and a bit of spice to make progression interesting. Events such as fires or epidemics can be controlled quite easily with reasonable placement of buildings and water points, and the lack of transparency of the game mechanics, the lack of sufficiently complete menus and graphics makes the game boring and sometimes even abstruse, especially in terms of building maintenance management or the prioritization of tasks. What the title loses in richness, however, it gains in aesthetics: Glory of the Roman Empire is graphically neat even if the environments are very similar, with a good level of detail and a nice day / night cycle, although useless. Also superfluous is the option to change all of the game's texts and comments to Latin in order to play it the way it was back then. What's more interesting, though, is that the solo campaign's thirty-one missions sometimes offer some non-linear options. A way to break a certain routine made up of levels, sometimes very short, in which it is enough to complete basic objectives to achieve victory, and others that are more tiring and will keep you busy for long hours. In addition to this campaign, the game offers a few skirmish maps as a bonus, as well as a challenge mode that consists of winning under certain drastic conditions (bottlenecks, revolts or facilitated epidemics) and allows you to compare your score online.
Conclusion
Glory of the Roman Empire is a small game with accessible gameplay that will keep the most fans of historical economic management busy for a while. It is graphically well done, the animations are funny and the content is fine. Unfortunately, the title lacks depth: the experience quickly turns into repetition, the flaw of a lack of wealth and the lack of control over a whole series of parameters, which would have made the game much more complex and therefore more interesting. An entertaining city builder for in-between times.
Originally posted on 2020-06-09 10:21:00.