Caesar IV [PC]

A lot of Caesar IV will be familiar to people who've played city builders. And not just because there's a Roman numeral after the title. The developers at Tilted Mill include former employees from Impressions, the company that put historical city builders on the map. This is the latest in a long line of games, both in name and spirit. And it does its pedigree proud.

Tilted Mill's last game, Children of the Nile, introduced some bold new ideas. But Caesar IV plays it safe. The basics are pretty straightforward. You pay to build houses, people move in, and then you make them happy by providing goods and services. There are three types of citizens: plebes for your basic labor, equites for middle class occupations, and patricians to pay taxes. Each set of citizens has distinct needs. When you meet these needs, their houses will upgrade, making more room for your people (or, in the case of patricians, paying higher taxes).

In addition to arranging your residential neighborhoods, a lot of the gameplay consists of setting up a network of goods. Goods are created from raw materials, sometimes in multiple steps, and then deposited in a warehouse or sold at marketplaces. Citizens will set out on their own to get what they need, so you won't be confounded by "walkers," the peddlers that went door-to-door distributing goods in earlier Caesar games. A basic economy is easy enough to get going, letting you move on to the business of meeting higher level needs.

Most of the higher level needs have personality. The plebes can get their water from wells, but everyone else is going to want fancy plumbing. Entertainment comes and goes based on the entertainers provided by guilds, so you'll probably want overlapping sources. Health care is divided between hygiene and medicine. Education and the law don't come into play until you're dealing with larger cities, but they're an important way to head off crime and rioting. Diversity of goods, which your people like, will almost always require trade with other cities. The exotic goods that really tickle the patricians' fancy will have to be brought from afar.

Religion is one of the most interesting facets of Caesar IV. It can give you tweaks based on which of the five gods is best represented. A happy god might give you a global bonus. There are god-oriented festivals for further bonuses, but these will have prerequisites that include a resource cost. For example, you can make the rich happier by declaring a Bacchanalia, but only if you've built a Governor's residence and if you have enough extra wine in your warehouses. Apparently, a drunken upper class will be happy to pay higher taxes. One of the best things about Caesar IV is how these gameplay dynamics have personality and variety. It's not just about plopping buildings in the right place.

Caesar IV is certainly one of the better looking city builders, built from a muscular engine and presented with a lot of lively detail. It's a bright game, and sometimes even a tad cartoony (look closely and you'll see plenty of slapstick among the plebes). There's a lot of variety in the buildings, a lot of traffic on the streets, and solid gameplay reasons to pepper your city with various decorations and visual upgrades. There are cosmetic effects like a day/night cycle and weather, which is appropriate to the region. You'll see thunderstorms in Italy and sandstorms in Egypt. The people in the streets even react to the weather, covering their heads when it rains.

With fancy effects for lighting and water, and with a free camera that encourages you to look around, zoom in, and enjoy the view, the graphics really deliver. There are absolutely lovely sunsets, dramatic flashes of lightning on stormy nights, and marvelous vistas with distant landmarks visible if you angle the camera just so.