The idea of a civilization sim based on the rebuilding of Ancient Rome implicitly delivers a delicious challenge: can Rome be built in a day? It’s a standard that any such game should be held to, and any such game should be considered a failure if it’s possible. Fortunately, Kabam’s Glory of Rome doesn’t disappoint in this regard, although some might wonder if it leans too far in the other direction. Indeed, the spans of time needed to succeed in the game have you ready for the Middle Ages after only a few levels.
The idea of a civilization sim based on the rebuilding of Ancient Rome implicitly delivers a delicious challenge: can Rome be built in a day? It’s a standard that any such game should be held to, and any such game should be considered a failure if it’s possible. Fortunately, Kabam’s Glory of Rome doesn’t disappoint in this regard, although some might wonder if it leans too far in the other direction. Indeed, the spans of time needed to succeed in the game have you ready for the Middle Ages after only a few levels.
At its core, Glory of Rome is basically Evony without the medieval setting and the infamously racy ads, which, of course, is basically Sid Meier’s Civilization without the Sid. Still, it’s nice to see Rome given some heavy attention for a change, and Glory of Rome places you at the latter days of the empire when the combined ills of war and luxury had slowly brought the giant to its knees. The idea, of course, is to restore Rome to its former glory (although they might have more wisely gone with the early days of the Republic for historical reasons), which is handled nicely though some little Roman touches. For instance, selecting a specific deity for your city will give you certain appropriate boosts (i.e., Ceres for production, Mars for attack, and Venus—amusingly—for population).
As with Evony, you’ll have around a week in which to build your defenses and increase your resources before other players have a chance to destroy your little town. The more ambitious players out there can skip this wait by upgrading their palaces to Level 5, but it’s best to spend as much time as possible building your walls and amassing food and resources since enemy attacks can be devastating for the unprepared. To reach this point, however, you basically have to keep the browser open at all times to optimize your leveling. Most structures don’t take terribly long to build at the lower levels, but since you need to build a large number of structures despite a limit of one construction project at a time, you’ll find yourself practically living in the game.
It can, in fact, be more than a little daunting, and the quest tab often reveals more than 25 quests focusing on different aspects of doing it what it takes to restore Rome to glory. Glory, in fact, is a measureable commodity in Glory of Rome, and you can increase it by amassing more troops and building and undertaking more research. Glory can also be lost after other players attack, but you can prevent this from happening as often by joining alliances that can come in and push back any attackers. And as with other games of this nature, Glory of Rome allows you to speak with other players in real time, either through your alliance or to the game as a whole.
Glory of Rome is certainly a nice looking game, but the many tasks and segments of time required place it somewhere just outside the casual market. At face value, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but unless you join an alliance as soon as possible your chances of living out your days unharmed are pretty slim. Plus, once you start to acquire multiple cities, the tasks required can multiply astronomically, and if you don’t have enough Facebook friends playing to receive multiple daily gifts from Fortuna or if don’t want to shell out real money for the expensive starter kits, your fledgling city states will conform to history and fade away. Couple these issues with an annoying tendency to ask to post to your friends’ walls with almost every action (which must be turned off window by window during each gameplay), you may end up wanting to sack Rome yourself. In the end, Glory of Rome is worth a visit for die-hard fan of civilization sim, but many others will simply find the price of glory too high to pay.
