Caesar III

The Good
gives you lots of challenging & funny gaming hours, not only in front of the screen - especially when you want to get to the bottom of it * music can be deactivated, non-important sound-files can be deleted or moved out of the folder * the challenge is very strange: usually you trust the manual, screen messages etc. but lots of your assumptions will turn out wrong, and that´s a real goody that has sadly been taken out by later remakes that therefore went boring. * can still be played 25 years later on windows 10 in a virtual machine environment, although it can stutter * offers different ways to succeed. it´s up to you to set individual goals, like having 100% at every score-pillar, speedrun, saving the lives of soldiers, most beautiful city, etc. finding out the innermost game mechanisms is also a real hard challenge. your head will be smoking for lots of days. * as a simulation it also offers lots of things to try out. e.g. in one level you can build a defensive wall, where all 6 legions of caesar will get permanently wiped out without a single man loss at your side. besides the levels there are additional game maps included. they appear when you have solved all the 11 levels. * different courses through the levels possible: peaceful or military way or mixed as you like * offers lots of details - there are war-elephants, war-camels, earthquakes, etc. also the challenges can be very different in each level. * difficulty is well adjustable, but remember - nothing is what it seems to be!

The Bad
game control is not optimized. you will often have to look inside some menu for information that should´ve got displayed in the main screen * save-file names are limited. so you cannot have large comments per file. also the number of save-files displayable is limited in the viewer (but not by saving). * extremely challenging which can bring you down. the levels grow not linear in difficulty. but today you can get lots of more or less helpful help from youtubers. but you want to solve it your way, don´t you? * takes dozens of hours of you lifetime, so it´s only for those who have lots of spare time * although you can set the gaming speed in 10 steps, this is not sufficient. sometimes you would like even more speed. and using 90% or 100% is buggy! in fights your army and towers will be less good, and sometimes the machine can lock up. so save often.

The Bottom Line
A really nice simulation, still a quarter century after it´s release. Attention: The original from 1998 is far more challenging than the later remakes.

The Good
The first few scenarios that also serve as tutorials really do a good job of sucking you into the game. You kind of want to build more and more stuff so that you will be able to see what comes next. There are also nice comments from the towns-people that tell you whether they are happy with you or not. The buildings look good and so do the people as they walk around.

The Bad
After some time, the scenarios become a case of doing the same thing, building the city and trying to meet certain goals which get harder and harder as time goes by. Then the military factor is there, its just a case of having more trained men than the enemy, and you have almost no control over them.

The Bottom Line
It is actually a very entertaining city building game, which is let down by an inferior military model. Play it to discover what a city building game should be like

The Good
The music is good.

Graphics are vibrant, and obviously a great improvement from Caesar II.

Battle screens have combined with city building screens. So battles will occur only on edge of the map.

The fact that you have to listen to your people is realistic. A country cannot do without its people. In order to improve your city, you have to listen to comments from your citizens and upgrade accordingly. You also have to manage more minor factors to success, like goods transportation, which Caesar II did not have.

The Bad
Battles are rather boring. You can only defend the city but not attack others.

This game is focused too much on city-building, in my opinion. If it could focus on expanding Rome while building cities, it could be the ultimate city-building simulation game ever created.

The Bottom Line
The assignments can be completed, but you will have unlimited Scenarios to do! Great game with several important factors to pay attention to.