Imperium Romanum Gold Edition

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Imperium Romanum Gold Edition on Steam (demo available)

MSRP: $9.99

Platforms: Windows

Release: 10/30/08

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City builders have always been a weakness of mine. There’s something soothing about putting down houses and roads, creating a functional economy, and making your townsfolk happy.  Frequently, city building is something that’s just tacked onto a military strategy, where all of your civilian infrastructure exists solely to support your military might. While Imperium Romanum Gold Edition doesn’t go quite so far as to allow you to completely disregard the need for a military, its focus is very clearly on the city building & economic aspects.

There are two tutorial missions – one for the absolute basics of city-building & an introduction to Imperium Romanum’s tablet system for mission objectives, and one for military. From there the game is dividing into scenarios & campaigns.  The scenarios are basically sandbox missions without objectives – at least as far as I can figure – and the campaign consists of multiple loosely connected scenarios that are objective based.  I’m one of those people who prefer objectives, so the 20 included scenarios aren’t that exciting for me, and I feel like a lot of effort was put into them when there could have just been a random map generator.

There’s nothing ground-breaking here.  If you’ve played other city builders, you know how they work. The graphics were a pleasant surprise, though – zooming in close is just as satisfying as viewing your city from afar. There’s also some intriguing mechanics choices – you will need to balance your slave population as well as your workers, and workers won’t travel all that far, either for jobs or amenities.  Unfortunately, there’s no way to see how far is too far, so there’s going to be a lot of trial and error trying to figure that out.

Imperium Romanum Gold Edition isn’t an exceptional game, but it’s a solid contender in the not-so-crowded city builder genre.  There’s ample content for a $10 asking price, and the play is enjoyable, if not particularly deep.  It’s not a must buy, but it’s worthwhile if you like to do some low key city management now and again.