Caesar Review

Anannya Sen’s Review

Et tu Brute?

Caeasar is the mobile adaptation of the popular PC game. But I won't bore you with the comparisons as to be honest, I have never played the PC game so I have nothing to compare it to. But I have played many God games on the mobile such as the brilliant Townsmen series. So how does this stack up to that you ask? Pretty well actually.

There are two modes to Caesar, the freeplay mode and the campaign mode. In the latter you have to complete a series of missions which similar objectives. These are usually to get the population to a certain level and also to focus on one aspect of life be it religion, education or something else. These missions are not easy and while you have a handy guide telling you what to do and when things go wrong, some of the later missions can be quite hard. Especially the one with the wrath of Jupiter in it.

You see, the game operates on the standard principles of all God games. Simple menu based controls and intuitive gameplay. As usual, you start off with money and have to build houses. These require farms to survive and water from wells. Once these are built you can build markets and schools to attract income and also keep the level of education up. The more houses you build (which are sustainable from your available resources) the more people will come to your city and after a certain point you can build new buildings such as reservoirs, baths, temples and barracks. Grow some more and you can build even more buildings, but you must be careful to get the balance right or the people may revolt. In addition to this stricture, you have to be able to grow the town safely as you may be under attack from enemy forces. This means you need barracks and guards to train, which proves quite useful as they combat the fires that break out as well. The challenges don't stop there as if you build too fast without a good level of health, an epidemic can break out devastating the town. As can earthquakes and even the wrath of Jupiter himself if you don't build any temples.

However, the money can be easy to come by and you can start to trade with other towns if you produce surplus goods. You can import or export, depending on the town, and you can also try and corrupt them with your wealth to give you favourable trade terms. The towns also present conquering opportunities and you can send in spies and then your garrisons to try and take over the town. But beware, if you send in too many garrisons, your city may not be well guarded and you may also not be able to prevent the fires.

The game plays very well, especially in the early missions. However, once you have got the hang of it, is is usually pretty easy to play through, the only downside being that there are some levels, where the space is very limited and building everything you need to build may be a problem. Still, it will take you a while to get to the point where you are classed as a big city and then you can build some of the cool stuff like gladiator arenas and amphitheatres. The graphics are nice in their overhead view and there's a great level of detail about them. Animation is good, and the still images of your helper or Jupiter etc, look very nice, as do the weather effects on later levels. There are some small animations of gladiators patrolling the streets or people wandering and you even get some chickens on the roam. One drawback is that for all these cool buildings you can erect, you can't see any smaller animations of what they do, like people at a market or at gladiatorial games etc. I suppose with the amount of buildings in there, this wouldnt' have been feasible. The sound is nice with a decent tune on playing the game (very Roman sounding) and also some nice but limited sound effects in the game.

You use the stick / D pad to move your cursor and the main button or 5 to select something. The right softkey brings up the action menu (build options, status, save etc) and the left softkey brings up the map for you to check out the other cities. The game is really simple to pick up.

The thing with this game, is that once you get to a certain point it gets a little repetitive. After many hours of playing, I'm at mission 7 now and it's the same old stuff. By this time you know how to set up your village, what roads to build and how to get it going pretty quickly. One really great feature is that you can build even if you go into negative money!! However, unless you start to make money back, you will apparently incur the wrath of Caesar, which never happened to me. With so much freedom, it's easy to establish the basics pretty quickly and then make the money back through markets or trade. You need to check your city on a regular basis although the little face in the top left hand corner will tell you how the citizens feel. The angry face is pretty funny. It's a bit weird sometimes as well as I have had the citizens on very high levels of education, health and religion and they are still unhappy. However, conquering nearby towns helps, as does having enough resources and also building some of the aesthetic things like gardens or statues. Sometimes I think it's just a bit of pot luck. Another thing is the mission objectives which say things like "a good level of education will be rewarded" so I have the people on 80 happiness and 100 education and get nothing. It would have been nice if this had unlocked new buildings.

Still, before I got to the point where the game was quite monotonous, I played it through for many hours and had a thorougly enjoyable time. Nothing all too new, but it's been done very well.