The idea of any city builder is to form a city that meets the needs and satisfaction of your townspeople. In CivCity, you will need to build houses for your people to live in, shops to sell goods, warehouses to stock items, arenas to provide entertainment, churches to allow religion and farms to provide yourself with goods to trade (You can do this in the game’s progressing campaign mode or in the objective-based mission mode). Unlike SimCity, the emphasis is more on the economy and focusing on formulating raw materials into profit. Despite this closer focus on your town and its people, CivCity still manages to fail to take any of the opportunities that are paved outright in front of it, which boils down to making the game fairly dry and lacking any revolutionary ideas for the genre.
The game places you virtually in the same position for each mission. You'll build your town and gather your resources with little to no difference between previous times. Adding to this, many of the gameplay elements of CivCity seem relatively dated also. Firefly Studios’ Stronghold series seems to be an obvious influence throughout the entire game, as well as elements from Caesar III coming into play. The game relies on many of the greater aspects that have formulated the genre in the past, but have since become pretty primitive and boring in today’s standards of city-building games. Not to mention that the title lacks any surprises to keep the freshness of the game alive. While you will have barbarians invade your city once in a while, or maybe a fire on the outskirts of your city, there’s absolutely nothing that encourages you to play through several missions.
As you can tell from this image, Rome wasn't actually that lively.
Trying to flesh out these boring and unimaginative aspects of the game is the inclusion of several Civilization traits. The game includes the building of wonders, which are situated perfectly within the history of Rome, as well as a Civ tech tree and Civlopedia. These features are fairly half-baked though - the tech tree doesn’t offer a great deal of flexibility in terms of what can be built after researching a certain technology, while most technologies will only allow certain boosts in city happiness or faster production in goods. It's rare to have a technology that'll branch off into providing new buildings or goods to sell. The Civlopedia is lacklustre too, especially compared to previous Civilization outings. To add to this, the game also features a combat feature where you can order warriors from your town to fight incoming forces. This feature is very poorly executed though, with an inaccurate AI making the feature seem like a last-minute add-on that wasn't necessary in the final product.
Since CivCity is more of a small scale game compared to SimCity, each townsperson has a place to go and has needs to be fulfilled. Build a new farm and one of your townspeople will begin working on it, going home once his shift is over, picking up some goods from the local store and watching the gladiators battle it out at the local battle dome down the road. Bizarrely enough though, the developers have added a really irritating radius element as to where your buildings must be built for your townspeople to access goods for their home. This means that you’ll have to situate churches, wells and shops right next to your houses if you want them to expand into much bigger homes for your population. The most irritating aspect of all of this is that it just ruins the structure of building appealing towns, not to mention that some of the townspeople are just so dumb-witted that they can’t move two tiles more down the street to grab some food. You’ll only face the backlash of this when your population begins to complain about not getting food or water to supply them. It becomes increasingly frustrating much later in the game where you’ll have to constantly destroy and move buildings just so your town can expand.
This game is almost as exciting as this play.
CivCity is an absolutely horrific beast to look at. No, not in the sense it looks outstanding, but that it looks dreadful. Much like the gameplay, the graphics look a tad dated. The game often becomes quite sluggish and pretty pixelated in areas. The overall performance of the game is pretty shocking and isn’t something that previous Civilization games have been accustomed to. In addition, the camera choice is very questionable in a city-building game. The angle of the camera and the lack of ability to pull the camera too far back unnecessarily makes building and watching your city grow too difficult. It’s also unfortunate that the game lacks any sort of detail either.
CivCity: Rome is hardly a push in the right direction. The game lacks any sort of polish or reference to the Civilization games themselves, and the developer’s inability to provide some pretty obvious features results in a rather meaningless experience that probably wouldn’t be suited for anyone.
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