Caesar IV is a fairly typical city builder sim, where your main objective is to build a glorious Roman city that’ll house its wonderful citizens. You’ll need to maintain food supplies, entertainment, water connections, economy, develop trades, and even protecting your cities from barbarian attacks. To add to this, gamers must also form a satisfactory level of ability to impress neighbouring Roman cities. This normally means keeping a consistent level of trade and upkeep for your citizens, as well as devoting special ceremonies to Rome and its Gods and sending gifts to Rome itself. Gamers can build these mammoth cities in either of the game’s single or multi player modes. In single player things are broken into a campaign mode where you’ll need to fulfil objectives whilst building your cities to satisfy Rome, such as having your city house a certain number of citizens, successfully using trades or providing enough entertainment for your town. This is also squeezed into a sandbox mode where you can build your city with freedom. The multiplayer mode, on the other hand, will have you comparing your towns with other players or even playing against each other to succeed in building towns. To say the least, there’s quite a lot to take in, which offers quite a bit of depth and management for gamers to sink their teeth in.
This extended list of features can often come as a bit of a hurdle for gamers though, especially those that are new to the genre. It’s pretty unattractive for newcomers since there’s a constant reliance on running back and forth to your advisors for advice and making small adjustments to taxes, wages and the amount of stock that is held by your warehouses. CivCity: Rome had the attraction of having a fairly simplistic approach, but also implemented an array of features that gave you the power to control your city. Caesar IV is similar in this approach but also makes managing the large list of features a little difficult at times. For instance, Rome may be demanding food supplies, which therefore means you’ll have to slow down your other trades to the town’s food markets and increase your production rates. You’ll probably then have to set-up secondary food sources so your townspeople don’t become too hungry and move supplies to a new warehouse - all of this just to satisfy one demand. As your town grows this constant management of everything can become fairly troublesome, since your warehouses only have a small cap to how much they can hold and having to situate various key buildings such as aqueducts, churches and entertainment facilities tends to become overwhelming.
Keeping a healthy town will prevent things such as fires and diseases reaching them.
But then again, that’s probably one of Caesar IV’s main attractions, its depth. There’s a lot to dig into and when clicking on buildings you’ll see all sorts of features such as demands for citizen buildings, the amount of employees on a farm and the current situation of the water supply for a bathhouse. That’s enjoyable, but the constant running around in fulfilling needs isn’t.
There are all sorts of available buildings to choose from when deciding how you want to construct your Roman city. There’s different housing accommodations, entertainment areas such as arenas and theaters, supply farms that allow you to harvest wine, oil, wool and ore, and all sorts of features such as statues and garden beds that add to your city’s charm. In constructing these various buildings you’ll also satisfy your townspeople by providing work and goods. And as you continue to provide better services for them, their accommodations will continue to improve, which gives secondary benefits such as more money and housing for new people.
What’s bizarre though, is that city building games are now leaning towards a stronger focus on combat and military management, which we really don’t understand. It’s an unnecessary feature that really defeats the purpose of building large and magnificent cities, since it’s a feature that’s best suited in real-time strategy games. While Caesar IV doesn’t feature a lot of combat, the way the game goes about it is a complete mess. There’s no strategic purpose of combat, which is based purely on the size of your army, while building military buildings such as guard towers and walls usually get in the way of perfecting your wonderful city. Controlling your army is cumbersome, with very little artificial intelligence shown.
You'll notice that, despite being a Roman city, things are incredibly quiet.
Fans of previous Caesar games are going to have a very different sense of appreciation for this game. Many of the features have hardly been extended on at all, despite the inclusion of a more up-to-date 3D engine. Things are still very complicate in the sense that you’re never given in-game flashes of your town’s problems, instead you have to go to your advisors and read the walls of text to find your problem, and by that time your town is already doomed. There’s not much of a significant introduction of new features and improvements on the old ones either.
Caesar IV features fairly ordinary interface options and controls. When choosing a building from the selection screen it usually takes up half the screen, which makes placing buildings and appreciating your work much more difficult than it should be. Also, the game is fairly inaccurate in mouse and keyboard control. When selecting buildings to construct it may need to be clicked several times before the game picks up on what you want, with deciding on placement of buildings having a similar problem. This is equally a problem when trying to position buildings on the ground, since it can often take several clicks before the game reacts. Moving your camera around is also frustrating, as spinning your camera around will react slowly, and panning your movement across the field will also have a similar reaction. It’s these very misdirected interface and control problems that really bury the game though, unfortunately. It makes the game much more difficult than it should be when trying to control your buildings and deciding where to place them. The game is typically quite demanding on some systems, and a number of bugs still persist in the game. Depending on your graphics card, problems like the ones previously mentioned and many more are still likely to appear throughout your experience.
Visually, Caesar IV looks good in parts. The game features some lovely weather and lighting effects that really make the game look superb as day will go to night, and sun will turn to rain. Buildings usually look quite attractive, as do the fields. Once zooming in on your town and its people, though, the game lacks all sorts of detail. The ground textures begin to show lines running through them, the animation and detail of your people are dreadful and there’s a lack of variety between some buildings.
While the game shows areas of brilliance, Caesar IV just isn’t any fun. With a troublesome interface and control structure, and over complex management system, trying to successfully build and manage your town becomes less fun than it should be. While the game can be appreciated for its minor merits, the overall result is fairly average.
Editor's note 10/20/06: PALGN learned after this review was originally posted that the inaccurate controls we experienced while testing Caesar IV was due to a specific bug in the released version of the game, relating to our graphics card. Portions of the review have been updated, since this bug is only apparent with several graphic cards, however the score hasn't been adjusted since becoming aware of this problem. It is likely that most newly updated drivers will have some sort of reaction with the game - slowdowns, reaction to controls and texture problems.
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