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Imperium Romanum

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7.9 User Score:

Mixed or average reviews

Based on 19 critic reviews
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Based on 10 votes
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Game Info

Publisher: SouthPeak Interactive

Developer: Kalypso Media - Haemimont Games

Genre(s): Simulation, City Building, Strategy

Players: 1

ESRB Rating: T (Teen)

Release Date: March 4, 2008

Summary

Imperium Romanum puts the player in the role of a governor of a province, where he or she must strive to build a well organized, prosperous and commanding settlement. Set in the time of the Roman Empire at its peak, players construct fortifications, towers, gates and bridges, while paying for them with a new currency. Imperium Romanum is a challenging, enjoyable, and authentic quest to rule the world. With missions based on real events and locations and enhanced by elements like crime and economics, Imperium Romanum is the complete historical strategy gaming experience. Impressive graphics showcase historically accurate buildings, natural disasters, and siege machines, as well as an improved battle system where the player commands their armies. The missions are interactive, so the players activate the goals when they choose. Build. Rule. Conquer! [SouthPeak Interactive]

Also On Metacritic

GAMES: Glory of the Roman Empire

Cheat Codes & Hints: Cheat Code Central

Also On The Web: Official Website

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

Cheat Code Central

Imperium Romanum offers tons of replay value, with different modes and virtually unlimited ways to play each scenario.

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Pelit (Finland)

Quotation forthcoming. [Apr 2008]

AceGamez

Imperium Romanum ticks all the right boxes; with an intuitive and easy to understand interface, a varied mix of scenarios to play through and a substantially improved graphics engine, there's a lot to like about it - but it isn't perfect.

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Strategy Informer

The level of historical detail on offer will be enviable to even the more established franchises, and whilst Imperium doesn't do anything to reinvent the genre as a whole, it's certainly a well-refined product that's worth a look to veteran players; or particularly those of you jumping in for the first time. Solid, if unspectacular then.

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PC Zone UK

If you can turn a blind eye to the ropey skirmishes, you'll be in for weeks of city building goodness. [Apr 2006, p.85]

GameStar

Imperium Romanum is fun, but it could have been so much better. There is no story to connect the varied missions -- that causes the game to feel lifeless and shallow. It's a shame, because it looks beautiful and is full of ideas, but fails in vital areas.

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PTGamers

Visually stimulating, with a friendly interface, but overall Imperium Romanum isn't very ambitious.

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GamePro

Imperium Romanum has some significant problems - it's a buggy mess, has horrible combat mechanics, and doesn't really get across what the problems with your city is - but in spite of these problems there is still a good amount of fun to be had.

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Worth Playing

A pretty standard Roman city builder. While that may seem like enough for hardcore fans of the genre, the title fails to really bring anything new and innovative to the table.

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Game Over Online

It’s a little boring and it’s a little easy and it’s a little basic, but if you’ve never tried the city-building genre before, then you might find it to be of some value. However, if you’re familiar with the genre at all, then you might as well skip Imperium Romanum, because you’ve already played better versions of it.

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PC Gamer UK

Much like roast dormouse: moreish but unsatisfying. [Apr 2008, p.79]

IGN

Everything here has a very paint-by-numbers feel to it and, while we're not enemies of following the traditions and conventions of the genre, there's no reason to make yet another Roman-themed city builder if you're not going to try to do it in a way that is noticeably different from the other three that are still sitting on store shelves.

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Gamer.nl

What is there to tell about Imperium Romanum, which isn't already been said about "Glory of the Roman Empire"? The game brings absolutely nothing new and feels like some tied together missions. Imperium Romanum is on the other hand a nice builder to play. The game is mainly a good title for newcomers in the genre.

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PC PowerPlay

It is not going to set the world afire with a wild reimagining of the format, but Imperium Romanum is a solid and enjoyable city management simulation, with some gorgeous graphics, an evocative soundtrack, and very confident execution. [May 2008, p.64]

Play (Poland)

This ancient city planning simulator got a bit more interesting, but is still lacking many managing options and the scale is certainly sub par, especially considering that the population of Rome at its peak was over 1 million. [May 2008]

Jolt Online Gaming UK

The gameplay is very basic and badly dated and, with all the top-end city building sims out there now, that makes it doomed to failure. With very little in the way of redeeming features, it is only going to have any kind of appeal to the most hardened of Roman history vets – ones who don’t know games very well so won’t know better.

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PC Gamer

Overly simplified combat. [July 2008, p.60]

GameSpot

Old-fashioned city building and bugs turn Imperium Romanum into an ancient ruin.

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1UP

You can play a few pointless sandbox maps that demonstrate the straightjacketed city progression, whether you're in Capua, Venice, Sparta, or Memphis.

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What Our Users Said

The average user rating for this game is 7.9 (out of 10) based on 10 User Votes

Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Pascal G. gave it a10:
Imho one of the best city-builders on the market...just perfect to relax after a long day of work...which is right now.

Rob H. gave it a2:
There's nothing particularly innovative or exciting about this game. I'm a big fan of city-builders but this does nothing to improve on what's already out there, and in many ways is actually worse. At best, it feels like I’m playing something from the 1990s with marginally better graphics. Building placement is simply about putting squarish building blocks parallel to each other on a perfectly flat green field around an arbitrary grid pattern. Each building type looks identical to every other building of the same type, which is particularly unfortunate as there aren’t all that many unique buildings to start with. Mines are even worse, as they can only be placed against a pre-existing pile of rocks or two like Lego with no flexibility about placement at all. To achieve the pinnacle of annoying arbitrariness, however, we can’t go past aqueducts. Aqueducts are enormous structures that literally tower over every other building on the map. They look ugly and take up huge tracts of what would otherwise be productive building land. Furthermore, aqueducts emerge from enormous fantasy-style medieval towers, usually emerging inexplicably from the dead center of a plain. The water ‘flows’ more like electricity than water, defying gravity and common sense on the way. On arrival to a city the water miraculously teleports to wells often several spaces away. In a bizarrely backwards move, there is no clear disadvantage to building anything anywhere, for example, a mansion will sit comfortably next to a brickworks without a peep from the inhabitants - there is only marginal 'desirability modeling' (is there a statue nearby? If so arbitrarily increase neighborhood desirability... blah). In fact, the only consideration behind building placement is to ensure that workplaces are close enough to houses to ensure that workers don't have to walk too far to get there. Under no circumstances will the inhabitants build anything for themselves, other than to ‘upgrade’ their houses as more goods become available. Whenever you need to build an outpost to ensure that workers are close to a distant resource, virtually every other single piece of infrastructure needs to be built as well to support them, forcing you to create mini-settlements all over the map with temples, schools, taverns, etc. It's all insanely annoying. Slaves are used for only one thing - shifting goods around, and you have no capacity to order them to do anything. Resource collection is particularly basic and unimaginative – collect wood, then bricks, then stone, blah, blah, blah. You have no capacity to innovate production at all, and there are no research trees. This means that every single new scenario starts off exactly the same way almost every single time. The military interface is also insanely tedious, for example, you can't select units by drawing a box around everything and moving the lot, instead, you must select and order each unit separately. I could go on, but suffice to say this game is a throwback, and the marginally positive reviews it has received to date are entirely inexplicable.

Farhan S. gave it an8:
The game's basic funda is city building as defined by the tag line. It covers all the part from the game CIV CITY ROME, with a touch of SIM CITY. Its value is in Graphics, AI system, and game mechanics or interface. Enjoyed Playing it.

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Imperium Romanum

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