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I have to be honest. When approaching the preview of Imperium Romanum I was expecting a boring, outdated title. I predicted a cheap knock off of Settlers, Caesar and Age of Empires all rolled into one but what greeted me was one of the best games I’ve played in a very long time, and that includes Call of Duty 4 / Team Fortress 2. Kalypso are definitely on the right track and hopefully the build quality will continue up to its actual release. What Imperium Romanum (IR) offers is a deep, rewarding god game that grants you control of key Roman settlements. It places you at the helm of construction, maintaining resources and protection and gives you free form as too how you keep your citizens happy. It’s not a new concept, and the Roman setting has definitely been seen before, but that doesn’t mean that it’s instantly stale. IR won’t ‘wow’ you with innovation, but it was never meant to. Its apparent aim is to bring everything good about the genre and make it as Roman as possible. The game is full of life and you’ll instantly care about your workers, civilians, slaves and armies. Hold on to your helms because the Romans are coming.

As soon as you load up the game you’ll be addressed by the most disappointing part of the game; the menu screen. There are four options on show; Tutorial (battle and general), Timeline, Scenario and Rome. Along with that is the options screen (with the typical graphical customizability), news (for when patches and similar items are released) and credits. The presentation is fine, but it’s a little hard to understand what does what, bar the tutorial. For example, I thought that the ‘Timeline’ section was a historical background section, not the ‘story’ mode which links individual levels together, i.e. the campaign. There’s Scenario which has twelve levels of varying difficulties which can be played at any time. They generally start with the basic forum (city hub) and let you build as you please. Finally is the Rome section which grants control of Rome, already pre-built and it expects you to construct its wonders and maintain its existence. Once you understand what each mode does, the ‘niggle’ becomes void, but it’s the primary section of the game that you meet and some extra help would have been welcome. 

The obvious place to start (following on from setting your options) are the tutorials which last about 15 minutes each. The general tutorial is helpful and teaches you the basics of construction, resource management and the uses of buildings. The battle tutorial will underline combat basics, giving you control of a small army. The tutorials are informative, relevant and useful and the aims are made clear and are very easy to follow. Once that’s completed, the most obvious place to start is the Timeline, the multi-path ‘timeline’ of Rome’s history (Rome in terms of the Roman Empire) which interlinks various missions with their specific objectives. Even so, the scenario’s are a good place to also begin, as you’re granted an empty city and depending on the scenario chosen you’re free to experiment with what you’ve learned in the tutorial. If you’re feeling really adventurous then ‘Rome’ is a good place to jump into, but only if you’ve really truly grasped the basics (and arguably intermediates.)

The timeline ranges from 509BC to 102AD and encompasses the whole of the Roman golden years. There are seventeen separate missions and three paths. Each level has specific aims and background, ground in historical context, but the general aim is there; build up your city, protecting it from barbarians and maintaining the needs of your people. Be aware, it may sound easy but it’s far from the truth. It’s not fiendishly difficult but it will take a little practice to get into the swing of things. The main core mechanic is balance. You need to balance the amount of civilians with their needs for buildings and resources. You’ll need enough slaves to transport and build, enough people to fill jobs, and enough buildings to allow people to have jobs. You gain population by building homes and their ‘level-up’ to more prestigious forms. With the wealthier citizens comes more needs and you’ll need to create new industries. For example, a ‘casa’ household requires sausages, which in turn requires a pig farm. The same applies to cloth, which comes from flax. Expand the town too quickly and you’ll have angry citizens on your hands, riots and burning down of buildings. There are a lot of resources to manage from raw materials like stone, wheat and water to secondary sources of sausage, linen, wine and bread. There are information screens supplying you with the general overview of their supply and three screens at the bottom of the game showing your current stock. Each building has an upkeep of certain resources; a tavern requires wine for example so you’ll need to stay on top of things.

Constructing buildings is a simple matter (resources willing) and the game uses an intuitive system to streamline the process. All you have to do is right click and it brings up a circle of smaller circles. Each is a specific category of buildings and you can click on the needed to bring up another circle of actual buildings for that category. Then it’s place (and rotate accordingly using the middle mouse scroll wheel) the building where you wish, which is usually next to a road. Once placed, your slaves will bring the materials needed and construct the building. City planning is important as build too far away from homes and a building will be unattended with nobody to fill the jobs, but build homes too far away from resources and they’ll start to become grouchy and unhappy. Every part of the game has been balanced accordingly and it’s rare that’ll you’ll feel overwhelmed. There are buildings for every part of Roman life, from recreational baths, to holy alters, to wonders like the Coliseum. Then there are barracks (for foot soldiers), archery ranges and cavalry stables which leads us onto the combat in Imperium Romanum.

This isn’t Rome: Total War. Combat consists of 3 stages; Creation, Deployment and Combat. You’ll create a Barracks and a squad will be based there. If you have enough resources (usually linen) then the squad will generate members until it’s at full strength. Once it’s at full strength, you deploy it to somewhere where there are enemies, usually a barbarian settlement. There your men will attack nearby enemies until one is either destroyed and if you’re the victor you’ll burn the settlement to the ground. There is the squad’s strength, the physical number of men and then there’s moral which influences how much damage your men will do. Archers lower morale, and therefore lower a foot soldier’s attack, but get close enough and then the archers will be massacred. There are several formations for each of the unit types but usually combat is played out in a paper, scissors, and rock format. The thing is that you’ll most likely be playing the game for the building possibilities, not for the deep combat system.

The game does a very good job at recreating the historic Roman feel. From the civilians bustling around the town on their respective jobs, to the birds in the sky and the weather it feels authentic. The graphics are decent and the engine is running very well. We experienced no slowdown and the game hasn’t crashed yet. Every building has character, from the sheepdog chasing the pigs in the pig farm to the bathers in the baths. Textures, shadows and effects are all clear and crisp and really help to elevate the game. It’s nice to look at and helps bring the game’s quality up to a good standard.

There’s plenty to do at the moment and it seems to be graphically stable so come review time it’ll take a big mix up for the standard to actually decrease. For those looking for a nice, charming game then look no further, you’ll just have to wait for release. Our review when it’s completed.

Imperium Romanum is being developed for PC.

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