Imperium Romanum (PC)

What the game loses in the appeal of the combat, it does more than make up for it in the city design and graphical lushness. I was able to crank all the settings to maximum and enjoy an ambient background of little details, flocks of birds, rippling water and so on. It’s all brought to life very well with lots of attention to detail. This is the kind of thing that I like to see in my games, especially now when we have powerful processors and graphics cards to support fully 3d buildings and proper 3d characters.

Not as though sprites don’t have their charm, it’s time for the sprite to step aside fully however and let 3d reign supreme.

Imperium Romanum’s attention to architectural detail is likewise pretty good, the buildings look period and they have a good feel to them. I particularly like the Gladiatorial Arena and the way your town hall evolves as you upgrade it to a Senate and so on. The game is also brought to life with layer upon layer of excellent animations for the various people, workers and life in the city. Every building supports some kind of animation, especially as day passes into night and the various lights come on around the city.

The whole thing can be described visually as beautiful.

The sound work is good, it’s packed with ambient sounds and spot sounds, there’s little in the way of voice acting which probably is a good thing since games of this type tend to suffer from badly portrayed voices by actors who should never work again in anything. At least they’re not as bad as RPG’s though, that odd breed of game where the voice acting (Two Worlds anyone) is even worse than some daytime TV or Soap operas.

I feel that Imperium Romanum is a decent step forwards for this kind of genre, it’s nice to see a city building game where there’s a lot going on visually as well as under the hood as the various AI systems manage the day to day lives of your little Romans. It’s just a shame that the lack of tactical options in the war side of the game detract from the actual game itself, the battle animations for this particular segment could have been done a whole lot better as well.

I say this time and time again but people could learn a thing or too by adding synch kills, random death animations and combat animations to defeated units. A little bit of thought in that area wouldn’t go amiss and might make a so-so game even better. It isn’t always about eye candy and fortunately Imperium Romanum has the depth of city construction gameplay to support it. It’s not a game that you will like if you’re into core RTS or just core Sim City style games. If you want a combination of a basic RTS tacked onto a great and functioning city builder, then Imperium Romanum could be the ticket for you if you’re into your history and especially the Roman culture.