Glory of the Roman Empire

During its time, the Roman Empire was the biggest and the most powerful empire in the world, with colonies spreading all the way to eastern Europe and even Africa. Although the entire thing collapsed under its own weight at some point, you must not forget that it took hundreds of years for that to happen, which is quite the feat, considering everything Rome went through over the ages.

Glory of the Roman Empire is a city builder that allows you to take things one step further and extend your influence on other territories as well, which means that you get to build an entire empire in the end, rather than just a city. By slowly growing in power and size, you can train a fearsome army to go along with your city and use it to bully other nations around Europe, until they give up and decide to let you use their resources.

Naturally, there are other ways as well, since diplomacy is quite important in the game and you get to discuss more than war with your neighbors. However, this part is not quite well refined, because there are rather few options you can choose from and they do not seem to affect your relationships too much, except if you declare war. Hence, although it might be more cost efficient to use other means to achieve your goal, you might often find yourself using brute force instead, just to avoid wasting time with diplomacy.

Since there is a campaign mode as well, you can go through a set of missions designed by the developers in order to show you everything the game has to offer. These scenarios have all sorts of different end goals and objectives, all of which aim to emphasize on specific military, economical, or social aspects of your empire. That way, you can learn how to properly handle every part of your creation and take full advantage of the results.

Technically, there aren't too many things to complain about, especially since the graphics quality is quite decent. It doesn't dazzle, but it certainly gets the point across and the game world is detailed enough not to attract negative attention. The same can be said about the sound effects and the music, even if the latter gets a bit repetitive the more you play it.

In the end, Glory of the Roman Empire does miss some elements from the mix, but that doesn't mean you cannot fully enjoy it for a few hours and even come back to it from time to time. The fact that you can expand around the map is certainly an attractive prospect, since city builders usually tend to get pretty narrow and crowded after a while.