And play you will.
Zeus is the best god game I’ve played this year, bar none, and one of the best strategy games as well. Even though it has a bit of a learning curve, and the battle engine, err, sucks,
Zeus is a wonderful game to play. Never quite taking itself completely seriously, it puts you in control of cities during one of the coolest time periods in human history -- the height of Greek civilization.
An interesting thing to note is that Zeus goes farther than any “realistic” sim, giving you the chance to converse with the gods and even have them come to your cities. Heroes like Hercules will also show up and help you, if you can give them what they need. This sort of blending of the historically accurate and mythological power makes for an interesting experience, something a little more like Populous and a little less like SimCity. And it works. When the Hydra appears in the first scenario, and you end up recruiting a hero to slay it, you’ll realize how cool this sort of meshing is.
The game itself is both simple and complex, depending on how you look at it. You cordon off land for either common or elite housing, although it takes a while to have all the goods that the elite want. Then you build various offices and locations for the people to work. You need to have water to every house, so a fountain is necessary, and you don’t want fires or collapsing buildings, so maintenance groups are needed. Once your people have these basic necessities, they’ll start wanting food from the store instead of from foraging. This means you’ve got to either grow food (in farms or vineyards or gardens), raise livestock to get food (goats produce milk that’s turned into cheese), or import the food. This is where the game starts to show its complexity. It’s hard to keep your citizens fully satisfied, but you’ve got to do it to get more citizens. And getting more citizens gives you the oomph to build more structures. Soon, your people will want cultural pursuits like Gymnasiums, Theatre, and Podiums where philosophers talk. It’s all very sensible, and very cool.
There’s a lot more to the game too. You embark on “adventures,” which are basically game scenarios. Each adventure has multiple stages, and your city often carries over between said stages so you don’t have to start all over from the beginning. Very nice. The scenarios range from relatively easy to damned near impossible, but they’re all fun.
Zeus also comes with an excellent set of tutorials that’ll teach you the basics and many of the more complex things before you delve deep into the game. I personally think that use of the tutorials should be mandatory for newcomers, as Master of Olympus has some pretty deep gameplay, but you can choose to skip them and lose quickly if you so prefer. (Veterans of the previous games in the series, such as Pharaoh and Caesar III can jump right into the advanced tutorials.)
With this much cinnamony goodness, you wonder if there must be issues. And there are a few. The battle engine sucks, but fortunately, battle rarely plays a major part of the game. And it’s sometimes difficult to see everything that you need to, especially when you’re laying road in crowded sections of town. You can turn the display to only show roads, but then you can’t really see what you’re building around or towards. Careful city planning can help this a lot, but newcomers may have some issues.
And if you don’t want to embark on epic adventures, you can always just fart around with a city on your own, with no restrictions. This is way cool, reminding me a lot of the original SimCity’s “have at it” attitude. You’ll spend hours and hours tweaking your city to perfection, and enjoying every second of it.
