For all those who have been waiting almost a decade for another Caesar game, CivCity: Rome definitely isn't it. While the game is true to the original Caesar, it feels more like a coloured carbon copy than a new version, complete with a myriad of problems ensuring that this is not representative of the glory of Rome.

The story is essentially the same as it was in Caesar; you start out in the lowest rank, as the manager of a simple mining village that you have to establish to supply a steady output of stone. It's a simple walkthrough mission, teaching you the basics, and as you progress through the subsequent missions you are given new technologies to implement. This is about the breadth and depth the story goes to throughout the game; as with any city builder, the story is merely there to give context, and this is a tradition that CivCity continues. This is possibly where the first problems start to occur; it is indistinguishable from the Caesar franchise, to the point where déjà vu doesn't cut it, because you have played through it before.

The simplest way to put it is that it's eerily familiar; the game is fundamentally no different from Caesar and it comes from a game studio, Firefly Studios, which has the same boss as the original creators of Caesar, Impression Studios. If I was one for believing in coincidences, this would akin to finding the Circus Maximus on Mars. Coincidence or not, it's a poor contribution to the genre, especially considering the innovation Firefly Studios have shown with their previous games, which if implemented here would have made CivCity a phenomenal experience.

The gameplay is relatively mundane, although the developers have implemented some new features in the game, with mixed results. One of the positive features is that you can now see inside people's homes and find out how many resources they have left stored in their houses. However, actually getting these resources is a problem, as each house has a range it can collect resources in, which are sadly set at an arbitrary distance and they have no relation to your city layout, or how far it will take the person to walk to get them due to obstacles in the way. Another problem with the resource system is that when you're progressing in your city, you get a building called a Cistern that supplies piped water to all houses; however this doesn't actually replace the need for well water, so you still need to have wells, but once the people have well water, it never gets used. This problem, mixed with the resource collection method, means cities end up having a poor layout, which is only increased by people having to be relatively close to their place of work and the fact that they don't care whether they live next to a goat farm or in the middle of an industrial district.

On the difficulty scale, CivCity: Rome is relatively easy all the way through; even the military missions are highly simplistic. It isn't even the rock-paper-scissors of combat, so your chances of getting invaded are very slim, and as you can only get a maximum of just over two hundred troops you aren't going to do much killing; walls and gatehouses play the bigger part later on in the game. The other thing that shows the game is quite easy is that I have yet to cause an accidental genocide of my people through neglect, although I did accidentally let the Carthaginians invade.

The graphics are possibly the game's biggest letdown, as they are very dated, which is quite shameful, especially considering that large cities can run slowly. The textures on buildings are poor and the buildings themselves are blocky; suffice it to say that the Romans wouldn't have found it very aesthetically pleasing. However, it does have surprisingly good lighting effects, which is possibly where the processing black hole occurs in the larger cities. The biggest problem is the camera angle, which is too close to the ground, frequently making the camera view obscured. Then there is the graphics resolution, which is fixed below anything even a casual gamer is likely to be using and exceptionally low for the more frequent gamer. It also has no support for widescreen and as a spin-off of Civilization 4, which supports higher resolutions very well, this is quite disappointing. Also a problem at these resolutions is that the menus are colossal; they dominate the entire screen and are bulky to use.

The music in the game is good, reminiscent of Holst's The Planets, notably Mars. However, the music isn't very context dependent, which fooled me several times when playing some of the relatively peaceful missions as I started hearing the Mars-esque music and thought, "Uh, oh, I'm dead," only for it to simply be the music playing and nothing more. It also got me the other way; I was playing one of the aggressive missions and was happily distracted, building things on one side of the map, whilst an army of Carthaginians were wiping out the other side; this was that minor event that lost me about five thousand people from my city. Ah well, easy come, easy go.

An ironic thing that crops up when exploring the game is that the Civlopaedia gives contradictory information to what is given in the game, whilst also being simplistic and somewhat childish compared to the one offered in Civilization 4. The names of buildings are also different to those cited in the Civlopaedia, but the biggest oddity in the naming conventions is that vineyards are called grape farms! Now, this might be a bit of pouring salt in the wound, but I'm pretty certain that everyone knows what a vineyard is, or at least anyone who knows what Rome is will know that vineyards are the places where you grow grapes for wine. They also name some buildings with the Roman term, like Cisterns or the Grammaticus, but name others with modern English terms like the Fire Watch, when in the Roman Empire it would have been Vigiles (as it is called in the Civlopaedia), and even if people didn't know what they were, the first few missions introduce you to all this anyway, and there's no escaping it. Such inconsistencies are trivial, but they give the game an unfinished feel.

CivCity: Rome had a lot of promise but it feels rushed, and possibly was rushed into publication to beat Caesar IV to release. However, this cost the game quite a bit; problems like the poor camera angle and dated graphics are sure to put off a lot of gamers, while feeling like a clone of Caesar will probably dissuade most fans of city builders from getting properly into the game. If you can look past these flaws then CivCity is entertaining for its length and has some good replayability in both its peaceful and military missions, but it's just not pushing the genre enough to survive when put up against the excellent, high quality competition.

Reviewed by Nik Gregory for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).