Though not without its own problems, it did a spectacular job of making an old and largely unchanged play dynamic fresh and contemporary. It's far from being the same game, but Civilization IV becomes a natural comparison. Again, the depth and mechanics are unquestionably there, the sympathy to the player less so. If developer Tilted Mill had gone for a suitably modern, tooltipped icon approach, rather than all that horrible 1990s-hangover giant text, they'd both have saved on fugly screen clutter and been able to include something sensible like right-clicking on the wine icon to jump to the nearest wine factory. No matter how many shiny shader effects are pumped into the game, the reasonably unimaginative art style means a grain farm looks really quite a lot like a vegetable farm, so checking on a certain building can require an ungodly amount of cheerless panning and zooming across several dozen similarly-shaped edifices until you manually find the one you're after. Best avoided if possible.Īlso infuriating is the lack of shortcuts to jump directly to certain structures. It's made even worse by a baffling bug that means selecting an option often takes two or three mouse-clicks before the game notices that you're trying to do something. It's like graffiti over a vital road sign, but really boring graffiti about aqueducts and olive groves. Even placing a structure can be utmost misery, abysmally-designed build menus spilling across almost half the screen, and sometimes requiring millimetre increment-shifting of the camera to try and find a suitable spot not obscured by swathes of nasty giant text. The trouble is keeping a handle on all ever-growing depth, and that's where the archaic interface violently strips Caesar IV of any claims to greatness it might otherwise have legitimately made. It's hugely satisfying to watch your new city start to emerge, to see the flow of people to resource to money to people and round and round and round working properly. But depth is why we're here, right? In theory, such micromanagement is pleasing, and certainly this is true of the early stages of a given scenario. Almost any given building is dependent on at least three other buildings before it's even vaguely effective, and in turn each of those buildings' employees/residents rely on a baker's dozen of balms for mind, body and soul to keep them happy. You can't see the plague, poverty and sexual deviancy from all the way up here.Īll pretty reasonable, but complicated stuff - there's a hell of a lot to manage simultaneously. No matter how many caged lions you desperately gift to Caesar in tribute (his use for the poor, angry beasts isn't specified, and is perhaps best left a mystery), if your new arm of the Empire is consistently losing money, he'll send the lads around to sort you out. If a nightmarishly illogical road layout or a Malaria-induced worker shortage is delaying the passage between produce and cash, the economy will grow more slowly, your citizens will whine and up sticks, and you'll lose favour with Rome. There's certainly a decent sense of life to a large city, wheelcart-toting Plebs (and the occasional confused escapee from the sheep pen) haring along intricate road systems to collect, process, sell and export multifarious goods like so many poorly-washed ants. Cities bustle, water shimmers, light diffuses - good work, job done. Folk with a silly-money graphics card may gently lament that Caesar won't quite squeeze every last drop of pixel juice from their system, but it's plenty pretty. Everything necessary - that is, everything from Caesar III and then some - lurks within, but it's not always presented in suitably 2006, rather than 1998, fashion. A sign that though an awful lot of work has gone into making the mechanics of Caesar IV as exact as possible, perhaps less consideration has gone into what it feels like to be a player of this city management sequel, released eight years on from its last, and hugely popular, iteration. Why bother you with something that a) will probably bewilder and alarm you and b) you clearly don't even need to know about anyway? Do they really think you might have some deep-seated prejudice against MySQL, so overwhelming that its presence has to be flagged up separately from the inevitably gigantic and tedious EULA you already agreed to when you started installing the game? Especially when the game then tells you it won't actually work without this superhappyfuntime-sounding application, thus making the previously offered choice entirely futile. It's hard to take a game asking you if you want to install a MySQL ODBC Connector as a sign of good times ahead.
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