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Buggy and lacking depth.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 57 / 64
Date: July 27, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This is a good attempt at a game that sadly misses due to obviously being rushed to market. There are several game breaking bugs, for example the cursor ingame is skewed and doesn't match its location on the map. Meaning it is difficult to target. The graphics aren't very good, yet the performance is pretty poor on fairly powerful machines.

Furthermore, this game has a very poor interface with big console like buttons, and a clumsey build interface. The economic system in the game is completely lacking, with little indepth data on the inner workings of your city.

Medieval Lords, a low budget title from Monte Cristo is a far far better city building game than this. Ultimately, this is a dissappointing game that could have been much better if a bit more care was taken during development.

Repetative and flawed city builder.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: July 28, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This is billed as a collaboration between Firaxis and Firefly, but for the most part the signs of this are skin deep. Firaxis is only present with a Civlopedia and Smiley Faces, nothing more.

Bad controls, lackluster graphics, and fairly mundane gameplay are bad enough, but this game suffers from some pretty serious bugs and gameplay issues. The combat won't satisfy warriors, the lack of depth won't satisfy veterans, and the difficult mechanics will annoy newbies. In close, this game fails to please anyone to any great degree and is a poor showing by Firefly.

Firefly/Firaxis Deliver

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 8
Date: July 28, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I have found little about this game I don't like so far. I find the game highly addicting for one thing. The artwork and animations are great, not to mention the game runs very smooth. The only complaints I have are its hard to target things at times, no strategy in the military aspect and it takes a long time to load. Other than that, its great!

Take 2, not good enough

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: July 29, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game sadly dissapoints fans of Sid Meier's civilization. The game's objective is to fuse city building with concepts of civilization. While the confluence of the two may seem conceptually genius, this game fails to encapsulate the true meaning of the two. I have got to admid the graphics are good, but a great game needs more than amazing graphics, it must also be fun to play. The game play is easy, once you get use it. Sadly, Pharaoh is much better.

Average City Building Title

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 42 / 44
Date: July 30, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Average city-builder game that brings nothing new to the table. Suppossedly, it's inspired by the Civilation series (specifically, Civ4), however it clearly lacks any measure of the in-depth experience and obsessive fun the Civ games bring to the table.

Game play is clunky and not as obvious as one is used to in either the Civ games or city-building games in general. For example, it's not obvious where you would send your tribute to Rome, and it took me several failed Roman requests for me to realize that I had to go to a menu, select the tribute in question and then dispatch it. The game is also buggy, or, perhaps this interesting "feature" is by design. My city was filled with two-thirds homeless and unemployed people, and yet my city happiness was at 100. This was without toggling any of the indicators that would affect my city's population.

Other lacking features include the exceptionally small map sizes (whereas most city-building games allow for large maps and ample opportunity to grow), build times being instant (very un-Civ!), and uninspired campaign missions. To name a few.

Overall, considering the claimed inspiration for CCR, the game is uninspired and uninspires. Pharoah and even Zeus are much better titles and have aged well, and you're more likely to want to play those games over CCR.

Disappointing City-builder game

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: July 30, 2006
Author: Amazon User

There have been many great city-builder games. Caesar III and Pharoah, while dated, are still the cream of the crop. When a new city-builder comes out, you have to compare it to other games that have already been done.

The idea of building an ancient city from the ground up is a fun one, and CivCity does a moderate job of doing this. You place houses, roads, resource-mining buildings, resource-processing buildings, et al. You have to make your people happy, create income-producing improvements, avoid bankruptcy, and avoid external problems (including wild animals, fires, disasters and invading armies).

A recurring theme in all these "city-builders" is creating a flow of luxuries - with each new luxury or two, your houses can upgrade in stats - initially huts, to hovels, and so on. Each upgrade produces more taxes, but takes more resources to maintain. This game is a lot more complicated in some ways than sim-city - you control a lot more aspects of your city than zoning and taxes. If we were only comparing this to sim-city, this would be a great game - it has more depth and better graphics than most of the sim-city games. As mentioned, there have bene other Civ-City type games before.

Civcity only adds one new feature compared to the older city-builder games: a "tech tree". Your city is able to research new technologies giving it additional advantages. This makes one think about Sid Meier's Civilization games (all of which are great), but the implementation is lacking in this game. Techs are easily acquired by spending some money and waiting patiently, and they do not have a huge impact on the game as they do in the Civ series.

CivCity's competitors (Caesar III and Pharoah) are both 8+ years old. Both of these games were more enjoyable to play, and better implemented (more intuitive to play, and visually pleasing). CivCity is not a bad game, but better ones have already been done.

Short, Buggy --- Bad!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 8
Date: July 31, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This is a very frustrating game, and once you figure out how to deal with the more buggy aspects, it doesn't last very long.

To get it going at all, be prepared to fight with their copy protection system. It wouldn't let me into the game saying something about software emulation until I shut down absolutely everything that was running on the computer before starting it. This means going into the task manager and killing processes like vptray.exe. I almost sent it back rather than going through this couple of hours fighting with it, but I perservered on the promises of the game.

Once you do get it going, there are two options for resolution, 1024x768 and 1280xNNN. If you use the higher resolution, the mouse is never hits what you're trying to click on, you have to move it around until you get it just at the right offset. This is particularly bad if you're trying to remove something, as you'll often end up removing things you want. This is better at 1024x768, but there's still a strange offset and you'll often find yourself clicking on something other than what you're aiming for.

The game is fairly fun once you get past these problems. But it only lasts maybe 20 hours at the most, and then there's nothing else to do. I guess you could replay it on the hard difficulty, but that's it!

Get this one when it's 1) fixed and 2) is in the bargain bin for ten or twenty bucks. It won't be long before it's there...

Same old same old

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: July 31, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Nothing much new in Civcity Rome besides the tech tree and the ability to move a house instead of deleting it. The homes you build have a limited range of how far the individuals are willing to travel for work and supplies. Which means you aren't building a city so much as a clump of houses in this spot to handle the farms, another clump over here to handle the docks, another clump for services so the houses can evolve to the next level which then get moved to a different classier clump. It all goes by a formula: a number of seperate block of houses which sit in the square middle of work places and services, just like in the old games of Caesar III, Rise of the Middle Kingdom, Pharoh etc. Same old same old. I would have thought that tired formula was sent to pasture. What city looks like that? Certainly Rome never did! The people are hard to please, too. Your future workers pile into the city before you have homes or jobs for them (you have no control over this)and hang around as vagrants until you need them. However, the employed people don't like the vagrants and get unhappy. So you give the vagrants a job, any job, just stick something somewhere to stop the complaints. People happy? No, because now they are unhappy that these new workers don't have a house (actually, the city is Ok with 50% homeless workers as long as they have a job, no jobless vagrants, please). So slap in another block of houses anywhere. Ok now? No,new vagrants have arrived and we start all over. Most of the game is placing homes and jobs in random places to keep up with the flow of vagrants. And don't forget about the statues, fountains and flowers. The people get upset if you don't have enough. Not necessarily in the city, but somewhere. I stick a lot in the woods since there is no room in the congested squares of city blocks. The people don't care if they can't see the decorations, they just need to know they exist somewhere. Lastly, despite your best efforts, and the fact that all services are within range of the people's homes, they will not partake of a lot of these services sometimes and that makes them unhappy. Don't know why they can't see that what they are looking for is down the street, but they don't. I can only build things so close to their homes. It's a bug in the game, including things like the meat vendors won't go to the grainery to get the meat or the warehouse won't deliver wood to the shipbuilder etc. The military didn't work all that well, either. All in all it's a poor game and I'm sorry I bought it so quickly. I'm placing my hopes on Caesar IV.

OK, but lacks principles

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 5 / 7
Date: August 05, 2006
Author: Amazon User

ok, i wanna get one thing straight first. i LOVE this game! it has great graphics, and decent gameplay. it isn't generic, like Glory of the Roman Empire, but it isn't the best, either. i still have yet to see a city builder where you can kill of some of your citizens for being mad for no reason. one of the flaws is SOMETHING that gets them angry, unemployment. It'd be nice if you could turn off immigration for awhile, or lessen the flow of immigrants. You just can't keep up with the tide of immigration. another flaw, though i thought otherwise later, is the fact that your watchtowers don't react effectively. they don't go down and put down the bad cats that are killing your citizens with clubs, instead they use slings, which isn't very much of a change, just a little less accuracy. and the third thing is the LAZINESS of the citizens. the butcher can be right next to a goat farm, and they'll just sit there. sadly, the military aspect is just so generic. you sit there and wait for an attack, you build up your military, then you slaughter the enemy in an age of empires kinda style. On a scale of 1-10, i'll give this game a 7.5.

Very thin

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: August 07, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game has no depth. It was kind of fun for an hour, and I felt there was no challenge left after 2 hours. The entire challenge is essentially one of geometry, getting all the right buildings within range of your houses.

Beyond these complaints, the interface is bugged. You often have to experiment with clicking as far as 1-2 inches (on the screen) from a building to actually get that building. Often clicking on Building A brings up menu for Building B a block or two away. This is especially frustrating with the delete function, as buildings you did not want to delete disappear.

Avoid. Get sim city, civ 4, or wait for caeser 4

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