Grand Ages Rome

If you are a veteran of games like Zeus or Emperor then you will probably find Grand Ages Rome (GAR) lightweight. However, if you are in need of a little light relief from serious strategy, GAR is good fun.

The game is set during the civil wars between Julius Ceasar and Pompey and then between Augustus and Mark Anthony. You get to choose your family and who to support in the civil wars and which sequence to tackle scenarios in, but apart from that replayability is limited (mainly because there is no editor). However, there are over 20 scenarios so there is probably at least 30 hours of fun here.

The game strikes perfect balance by being fairly simplistic(thus not putting casual gamers off) while still needing some time to get used to the way your perfect Roman city should work. For instance, catching fires was a major problem for me at first but, once I knew what caused them(i.e. mostly the lack of maintainance resources such as wood and clay) they were no longer an issue.

Graphics are brilliant, yet smoothly running, allowing for an option to zoom into the streets nearly at a first person camera view.

The character improvements after each mission and the variety of troops that could be recruited really gives this game an edge. Perhaps a small drawback is that, having spent quite a while with it, I find most of the first missions too easy now but this is something that can happen with most games when people get more skilled at them.

I do enjoy playing this game, its good fun and has great graphics. But there are some really annoying parts of it. There are quite a few different maps, each looking different and often very nice...But often the map simply doesn't provide the resources you need to run a healthy city... Therefore its only a matter of time until you get riots, crime and the dreaded fires. I've yet to find a map which has a store of all the different resources ( Please tell me if you know one). The game is really fun, but it has its limits, its sometimes impossible to keep your people happy as well as it lacking competitiveness... BUT it can be fun and it does look really nice graphically (Surprisingly low spec computers will do it as well). Im running it off an accer laptop with 2gb of RAM and a mediocre processor and can run it off 'Ultra' graphics quite comfortably. Overall 3.5/5.