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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.

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.

Guilty by Association

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 21 / 23
Date: September 01, 2006
Author: Amazon User

The Civ name has been tarnished. Analogously, one thing I have been learning is that just because Sid Meier's name is on a product, it doesn't mean the product is good.

In the case of CivCity: Rome, unfortunately, it doesn't just come in at "modestly good" - it comes in at "dismally poor." I've tried hard not to let this influence my beliefs about Civilization in general, but after Civ4 came out, I am starting to believe that Firaxis Games and Sid Meier are on their way out. And now this...

I regret to inform that the great Civ titles were made a long time ago. The offerings of today have a simple pattern: the production was rushed and the title came out with major bugs; the games add unnecessary features designed to justify the overall cost; and the consumers are often abused with ridiculous expansion packs containing features that should OBVIOUSLY have been included in the original release - they take advantage of our love for the franchise.

This pattern is so evident that the whole Sid Meier and Civ franchise is degenerating. It almost seems, especially with the release of CivCity: Rome, that we are once again expected to simply drop cash for new products based on our love for the old. But the developers are not living up to our expectations for producing great games!

Stay away from CivCity: Rome. Besides the obvious blunders associated with all the bugs, you will see that even the best patch cannot make the graphics look good, the narration and sound effects better, or the interface to work properly. The game is a dismal failure, and I am sorry to report that. It seems like Firefly Studios had an idea and got the license from Firaxis, but they just cheesed it.

Watching what Maxis (The Sims and SimCity franchises) and Firaxis (Civilization franchise) are doing to their most loyal fans is like watching your dad get drunk.

Good game - I like it

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 11 / 12
Date: September 21, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I think this is a great game and my wife and I are currently addicted to it. It's definitely more to the SimCity style of play than the Civilization series; though it allows more granular control of your city than SimCity. The only Civilization aspect is the research which is enjoyable. But other than that there isn't much "Civ" to CivCity (which isn't necessarily bad).

This game reminds me heavily of a german title "Knights and Merchants" (1998) but with much better implementation. On that note, if you find that this game isn't for you, try the VERY similar but much easier "Glory of the Roman Empire".

This game is definitely challenging, but in a good way. Someone complained about small maps - the maps get bigger as your progress through the game and the small maps are small for a reason - it adds challenge to the game (for example, there is an island map with limited resources which requires that you build a shipping fleet). The interface is generally good, but there are some non-intuitive things like sending tributes.

I think the graphics are nice, especially the temples, but it's definitely not the end-all as far as graphics go. There are a lot of city beautification enhancements (fountains, gardens, etc) that I don't tend to mess with, but they are pretty and increase your city's happiness. (Your citizens will candidly tell you if they think your city "is a dump". I think they did an excellent job on the citizen interaction - amusing yet useful.)

Regarding the "game breaking" click-select bug. I'm playing at 1024x768 resolution and I barely have any problems with it. When I do, I simply rotate my map and I'm able to select what I want. I don't consider the bug to be "game breaking" or even all that annoying; though I'm glad they're coming out with a patch to fix it.

All in all, I think the game play is excellent. Like all modern games, the implementation was rushed (nothing that a patch won't fix, though). I suspect the game will age well and have a high-replay value.

Sadly disappointed

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 10 / 11
Date: September 12, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I was really looking forward to this game, and I was prepared to overlook one or two things. Every game has it's own personality, right? I found instead this game actually doesn't have much of one at all.

I didn't mind the graphics. Not cutting edge sure, but not that bad either. A little muddy but a change from cartoony. It was hard to enjoy closeup views, however, when so many buildings lost their roof on zoom. No way to toggle that feature. The camera angles were frustrating and it was very difficult to pick anything out with the mouse accurately.

Not that there was much time to look at the scenery. Immigrants came. And came. And came. Whether there were houses and jobs available or not. As long as city happiness was high enough, which meant that everyone was happy. Which they were not. Because they had no houses or jobs.

To keep city happiness up was the only way to ensure a somewhat stable economy. Forget planning. Forget balancing resources with workshops and markets. It wasn't clear what the balance was in any case. It would take trial and error, and you didn't have the time. For you were building worshops like mad, trying to guess at how many citizens would be employed by each, and researching for temporary bumps to keep your city from being deserted in droves.

The best income boosts were not through sale of goods or trade. It was through research, maximising the tax base with the development of currency and so on. You hit those early on, and reached a certain population level, you made money. The rest of the time you spent trying to keep people from leaving. There was no stability in reaching any level.

It quickly became a game of keep up. There was no way to control immigration or set the pace of development. And for all the decorative options, more than the similar games out, you really didn't care in the end what your city looked like, because it just cost time. Money too, but that was really not the relevant issue. Unless people were unhappy. Then you could stick a few things, quickly, somewhere. You just can't enjoy a leisurely pace of planning, building and finishing it off with a nudge here and there and watching it run...you have to be constantly involved in the process, staying ahead of the curve. You don't have to worry about maintenance, such as city fires or engineers, but the cities cannot not be made self-sufficient or self-sustaining with this inherent instability built into the gameplay. Five or ten minutes away from the screen will bring most cities, if not all, to a screeching halt.

While I enjoyed the research options, and the ability to move homes I thought was a great innovation, not having the ability to control the flow of immigrants to the city and pegging success to city happiness makes this game a poor economic simulation and the gameplay ultimately very shallow and unsatisfying.

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.

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

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.

Wait for it to hit the discount bins

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 8 / 9
Date: August 14, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Like the other reviews, I find this game a rip-off of Caesare III. (I didn't know there was a IV! Must look into that.) While the graphics are admirable, the gameplay wasn't challenging at all. It didn't take me any time at all to win, and I'm one of the worst game players ever. OTOH, it's a good afternoon waster if all you want to do is build and perfect your city in open play with no goals. Don't buy it now. Wait until it's cheap, like $9.95 or something.

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