Review by: Troy S. Goodfellow

Let’s be honest. Most of us are tired of Roman city builders. Has any other historical setting been so ground into the dust in any other genre? There’s the four part Caesar series, CivCity Rome, and now the third city builder from Haemimont Studios. It’s a cautious update of their formula, but for some reason it sticks this time. If you would rather never build an insula again, there is not a lot that Grand Ages: Rome can do to convince you. If, however, you still want to be a desktop Caesar, this is Haemimont’s best effort yet.

Superficially, the game covers familiar ground in familiar ways. You work your way through a series of scenarios, building a new city from scratch all along the way. Each scenario has goals of increasing difficulty and you build all the usual Roman things: farms, vineyards, aqueducts, housing, temples, and so on. A few of the military buildings aside, you will find nothing in Grand Ages that you haven’t built somewhere else, but there are subtle changes to the formula that help the game stand out.

For one thing, Grand Ages has ditched the card game mechanic of the earlier Imperium Romanum and doesn’t bother with evolving housing, a constant city builder feature that serves little purpose beyond frustrating micromanagement in the end game. The three levels of housing have different needs on a couple of levels. Each has a minimum requirement of food or goods or clothing, but adding additional citizen satisfaction makes sure the residents don’t turn to crime. If crime grows to “riot” level, your city can quickly go up in flames, especially if the rioters target the local fire station (“praefecture”) first.

The campaign structure has a veneer of historicity that you generally don’t find in these games. Help Pompey stop the pirates! Help Caesar conquer Gaul! Help Cicero improve life in Sicily! The vast majority of gamers don’t care about any of these details, but the campaign is organized in such a way to tempt you with different rewards. There is a constant threat that you will be cut off from certain missions at a point in the campaign, but this happens too late to really interfere with you experimenting with keeping everyone happy.