Customer Reviews

Imperium Romanum

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If truth be told, City-Management has been a staled game genre for years. Sure, graphics get improved, physics get augmented, various minor creative strokes get added; yet, the basic concept stays the same: build your city, keep the majority healthy and happy, maintain your finances in the black. In an attempt to spike this with a little RTS, skirmishes have been added lately. IMPERIUM ROMANUM is one of those cross-pollinating attempts.

Graphically the game is very well made. Zoom in or out and the detailed textures do justice to all of the buildings and environmental elements - whereas, the sounds follow the zooming level, getting louder as approaching. The citizens, though, feel like animated plastic toys, and seem out of sync with the rest of the imagery.
What I found particularly disappointing (for a game released in 2008), was the...sudden appearance of the structures getting built! I mean, if (7 years ago!) EMPEROR OF DUNE managed to have the buildings progress on screen, why do I see a worker hammering on the ground the foundations one moment and the finished, say, city-wall segment appear the next?

Rome was not built in a day; it will take something like...10-12 hours to complete its first run, with little replay value. Unless of course one is a Roman era aficionado.

Finally, IMPERIUM ROMANUM tries to incorporate some RTS elements in the form of skirmishes. Tries and fails. These skirmishes feel like a rushed afterthought and offer little to the overall gaming experience. Because an army has to be maintained, special buildings have to be built (barracks, archeries etc), on top of the usual city utility necessities. Likely, the interface is simplified and intelligent and this makes controlling the game easy. In the end, though, it is not worth the extra hassle.

Overall, IMPERIUM ROMANUM is a good City-Management game that has little new to offer besides improved graphics and a well below average RTS.
A chimera of limited success.

The Good Side:

Even though the Military action is a bit hokey, the overall emphasis is on City Building, and although some reviews state that it is basically the same game as before, I tend to disagree.

The graphics seem to be a little more realistic and eye pleasing, and with the pleasant music playing in the background, it is actually a very relaxing game.

The Bad Side:

The Roman citizens still tend to complain quite a bit, even when you have provided them with a flourishing economy, and for some reason other citizens still remain poor and resort to crime. The number of fires and vacant buildings have been dwindled down quite a bit from the original version and that is the biggest relief.

Overall, I love this game and highly recommend it.

Ave friends and citizens!

This is a good game, but leaves you wondering, where is it going?

Gone are the days of Caesar II, when the city and province screens were separate, and even the military was managed separately.

I think that if a product, like Imperium, could improve on the best qualities (province management and military) of Caesar II, then you would have a perfect marriage for Imperium, city building and RTS.

Decent game played all the city builders still looking for that in depth management I got from ceaser 3 but not here.

I had the demo of this game and really enjoyed the demo so I decided to purchase the full game. Definitely not disappointed with it. great for the history buff in the gamer. Also makes you think of strategy a bit and how you will handle certain things.

I've only had this game for a few days. I was starting to get into it, and thinking strategically about city layouts, when out of the blue this horrific game crash has really dampened my experience, which is why I'm only giving the game 2 stars (I'll update the rating if I can play the game without constant fear of crashing).

I was in the middle of the second historic scenario. I had been playing the game for a few hours, and went to go lay a house down, and boom, the entire game crashed. Not only did I lose my scenario (the game will crash if I try to load that scenario again), but I lost all my configuration/graphics settings. Hello?!

I've read on forums of other people running into similar problems. Graphics card driver? Maybe. But would that really cause auto-saves to apparently not work and the entire configuration settings to be lost? It seems like there's some bigger bug than just your run-of-the-mill graphics drivers issue.

Regardless, I've updated my graphics card driver (GeForce 9800GTX) with a slightly newer version from nvidia.com (Nov 2008), and I will try the game again (I've been reluctant to start it up, though - even though it's been a week - I suppose if the game play had been more fun, like some other city-builder games have been for me, like 'The Settlers 6', 'Anno 1701', and 'CivCity Rome' were for me, I'd have tried playing it again sooner, but I was still getting into the game when the crash occured). If the game crashes again with the new drivers, then I'll try turning the graphics down from Ultra to High, and so forth (although I won't be thrilled, if the game play is fun enough, I think I'll get over it).

I'll probably increase this rating once I'm able to get into it more.