14 DAY TRIAL // Hegemony Rome: The Rise of Caesar is a video game that is nicely settled into the strategy genre and tackles that moment in the history of the Ancient World when Rome, under the leadership of Julius Caesar, moves from the republican structure to the Empire that will then conquer most of the known world.
Development was handled by Longbow Games using some innovative mechanics and a beautifully looking cloth map.
Total War: Rome II is a title created by The Creative Assembly that aims to simulate conflict in the entirety of the Ancient World and one of its add-on campaigns, called Caesar in Gaul, follows the leader as he conquers modern-day France and England in order to cement his reputation.
The games are fairly similar, but it is impossible not to notice that even if they focus on the same character and are part of the same genre they do offer very different experiences and point to different futures for the strategy space.
Total War: Rome II – Caesar in Gaul is much more interested in the spectacle of conquest, the careful simulation of units and the team at The Creative Assembly has spent a lot of resources in order to create a powerful game engine for the real-time strategy battles.
The game also places more importance on the generals that led the armies of Rome and its enemies and features a variety of agents that can hinder forces and can disrupt an entire region.
Hegemony Rome: The Rise of Caesar is in many ways a simpler title, which can easily be played entirely from the strategic map, without ever having to zoom in to see the battles.
Longbow Games is less interested in how the clash of steel on steel looks and wants players to understand the scale of the campaigns that Caesar conducted and the complexity of the problems that he had to solve in order to succeed in his conquest.
I liked playing Hegemony Rome: The Rise of Caesar, but I ultimately found it a little too unpolished to spend a lot of time with it, but I am sure there’s an audience of strategy fans that will love its mechanics and its approach to history.
I plan to return to Total War at some point during the summer, but I would like to see the system of the Longbow Games title applied to other moments in history.