CivCity: Rome

The first major spin-off from one of gamings greatest wonders.

CivCity: Rome is the combined effort of Firefly Studios of Stronghold fame and Firaxis, the guys behind the Civilisation series. We’re not sure what was meant to come of this union – a city-builder with the depth of the Civ games maybe – but whatever it was it just didn’t happen.

City-builders are definitely an acquired taste. There’s little to no combat, nothing really explodes or dies gruesomely and the rewards, other than victory screens and event timelines, are few. The real joy comes from building a city from scratch and watching it prosper, thanks to your intelligent leadership. If you’re looking for a good example of a game in the genre, look no further than SimCity.

Now, CivCity looks to have the fundamentals and the tools required to complete the magic formula. Unfortunately most of the player’s time is spent guessing needs, dealing with the awful interface and trying to figure out by raw telepathy where problems are occurring and why. The graphics are also incredibly plain, but then graphics have never been a strong point of the genre.

Right off the bat, there’s a lack of information sources and screens to figure out how your city is running (there’s a kind of cool feature to follow individual families in the city, but it’s hardly sufficient). For example, you build a carpenter’s workshop to produce furniture – a luxury good that helps improve the quality and size of the homes of your citizens. Obviously you need to build a lumberjack to start chopping wood… but how many do you need? CivCity fails to detail in any way the output or input requirements of any of its buildings, leaving you, for the most part, to be crazily inefficient as you balance the needs of your industry with the power of your workforce. One could argue that this is part of the gameplay, and in a way it is. But the whole point of city-building isn’t to ‘guess’ these details – it’s to have them provided so you can make good infrastructure decisions based on them. This is where the main gameplay and the fun lies and it is sadly absent from CivCity.

The interface also doesn’t help. For some reason building selection buttons are hidden in a mess of menus and the HUD itself is larger than it needs to be. Somewhat counter intuitively, the Escape button doesn’t exit out of your current order, be it building a structure or laying down road, and instead brings up the main menu. It’s a minor gripe but one you’ll find excessively annoying. Finally, the zoom out function does little actual zooming out, and even at its maximum level leaves you scrolling around even the smallest of cities.

CivCity: Rome is certainly an ‘attempt’ at re-invigorating the city-building genre. It’s just a shame it’s so mysterious to play and the interface is impossible to use.