Having only recently delved into the management of the urban metropolis that is New York it was a welcome change to try something a little more back to the age of the classic sims like The Settlers and Civilization. Glory of the Roman Empire thrusts you back into the age where Italy was still finding its feet and lets you build major cities from the ground-up.

   

The gameplay is simple, but as a colony gets larger it has different needs and trying to satisfy all of them while still keeping the colony prosperous gets harder and harder. The level of thought that has been put into the management aspects and historical detail has to be admired - the simple act of providing meat takes at least four different buildings to house workers, raise livestock, cook and distribute the meat!

   

The level of autonomy and detail with the animations of your civilians is also impressive; they’ll wander about if they’re unemployed or perform jobs which often require several different tasks (like growing and harvesting crops). After work they’ll go to the well to fetch some water, collect food from the tavern for the family and then head home for a bit of kip! In most other sim games the civilians either move in a circle of animation or enter a building and come out some hours later to go home, but GotRE really helps create the feel of a living breathing Roman civilisation. Close-up the graphics aren’t the best around but with the amount of intricate actions you can see going on it really isn’t much of a deterrent, especially since you spend most of the time zoomed out as far as you can anyway!

   

From what we got to play the main missions seem to be fairly and short objective-based, where you help develop a little bit of the city (crop-harvesting, trade routes) or solve a problem (plague, fires) and then move on to help another city. We didn’t get to see Rome itself and we’re looking forward to hosting some gladiatorial combat and chariot races in the ancient city, and hope it lives up to our expectations.

   

From what we can see the only issue with GotRE is that if the main missions will only be short, and skip between cities will there be enough variation to keep things interesting? Building up a city from the ground and following it all the way to greatness would probably be more satisfying, but hey, I don’t make games! Keep an eye out for the full review soon, where we’ll see if it’s guts or glory…