14 DAY TRIAL // Hegemony Rome: The Rise of Caesar is in many ways an atypical video game, especially for the real-time strategy genre, the kind of experience that will remind players of a time when developers were not afraid to try and innovate, both in terms of graphics and mechanics.
The experience from Longbow Games makes an immediate impression with its use of the map, which offers a very classic look when zoomed out enough, with classic figurines and lines placed and drawn on it in order to show where units and locations are.
It’s all entirely dynamic and allows the player to keep tabs on his growing Roman empire and on the actions of Caesar without resorting to the pause button too much.
Hegemony Rome: The Rise of Caesar is a fast game and it requires the gamer to split his limited attention and resources to deal with more than one crisis or battle at the same time.
The cloth-based map makes the entire game manageable and fun and the only problem it has is that actual geographical features in the various provinces are hard to make out and units sometimes refuse to move because of them.
In a manner similar to the IRISZoom engine used by Eugen Systems for its RUSE and its Wargame projects, gamers can also choose to zoom in when playing Hegemony Rome: The Rise of Caesar in order to see their units as they battle their foes or take a closer look at the various locations.
I rarely did this, in part because Longbow Games is a small team and clearly lacks the resources to create a game that can rival the best graphics offered in the real-time strategy space.
But, more importantly, zooming in meant that I was no longer able to see everything that happened around me and I often paid the price, in terms of battles lost, when I spent too much time without checking all my legions and cities.
Hegemony Rome: The Rise of Caesar is not a perfect game by any means and the development team at Longbow Games has pledged to add new features and tweak balance via patches.
But the strategic map they have created is truly beautiful to behold and easy and fun to use and I would like to see how it can be used in the future to illustrate other historical periods and the actions of more historical personalities.