We've come a long way in City-builder games, and yet Caesar IV looks like it's taken a couple of steps back.
Unfortunately, in Tilted Mill's self-conceited race for a 3D City-building game, they had completely trampled on their past achievements (actually, Impression's achievements, but Tilted Mill and Impressions are largely the same people under a different name). Caesar IV is little more than Caesar III was, aside from the obvious difference in the move to 3D, which is in my opinion a grave mistake, but more on that later.
Perhaps the greatest triumph of both Pharaoh and Emperor, and the reason that they were so much fun to play even for those who had played Caesar through a hundred time, was that they had added elements to the game which served to immerse us into the specific periods and the cultures in which they were set. In Pharaoh, many missions revolved around the construction of major temples, tombs and pyramids, by careful management of slave labor and the manufacturing of exquisite goods to be placed in the constructed monument. The specific method of working the Nile's inundation was a stroke of brilliance on the developers' part, and was both fun and educational. In Emperor, elements of authentic Chinese city-planning were introduced, such as the walls that surrounded residential neighbourhoods, separating them from bustling market areas, a key component of ancient Chinese civil engineering. Also Emperor had great emphasis on political relations between cities, the important element of Feng-Shui in building placement, as well as the introduction of gods who intervened directly, in their human forms, like Bodhidarma who could actually fight for the player if he was appeased appropriately, much in line with Chinese philosophy and ancient culture.
And here comes Caesar IV, all shiny and rotatable, and fails to achieve even a fraction of the immersion that we who have been following the genre have grown used to. Obviously, constructing Roman cities is by definition an immersion into Roman culture (the moment you place down a bathhouse pretty much distinguishes you as a Roman builder), but as far as the cultural significance of the player's actions in this game, the distance and alienation reign supreme. Caesar IV will task your nerves to such an extent, that you won't even care who's city you are building or for what purpose - you'll just want to get the city functional, and you might spend hours trying to fit in all the parts. And then when it's finally functional you'll realize that you can't possibly fulfill your goals without some major reconstruction... By the time you've finally solved all the little problems in your design, the mission will probably be over and you'll just be glad you can finally go to the next one, with no real involvement in the city you've just toiled to build other than the petty scrounging for free squares and clay units. Which brings me to my second real disappointment with the game - the move to 3D has perhaps made the game more visually attractive (In my opinion, it REALLY failed to do that as well, but I'll concede that too many gamers today regard 2D as going back to the 18th century), but it has opened a can of worms that Tilted Mill have failed miserably to contain. In a game where every piece of land is crucial (and in many missions you'll be screaming for just a bit more land), the new handling for building placement, road construction, and many other functions in the game, are so utterly confusing and not player friendly to the least. You're expected to plan a city, to build a well-oiled machine that could overcome the problems constantly thrown at you, but you are not given the tools to measure, to estimate, heck, you're guessing your placements half the time. Buildings can also be placed at 45 degrees, which is great theoretically, but in practice causes the player to waste more space than ever on strange angles and corners which can't be filled with anything but large unsightly patches of bushes. Quantifying the effect of... well, ANYTHING in this game, is a guesstimate that has gone completely out of proportion. In other words, you're a civil engineer with no rulers, levels, or even strings and sticks. You have to eyeball everything, and unless you build it all first and then sort it out as you go, you're going to end up tearing down half your city to make room for, well, the other half. But in fact we've never had measuring tools in these games, nothing fancy anyway. But in a contained 2D environment it was far easier for both developer and player to accurately and easily get a sense of size, distance and space for construction, being able to truly plan ahead and add as you go. I can't begin to explain how frustrated I was the first time I tried placing walls in Caesar IV, only to find that they collide with all sorts of invisible barriers created by the landscape, other buildings, pretty much everything, forcing me to redesign an entire section of the city just so I could fit in a couple of stone bricks.
And what was so bad with 2D Graphics? The artwork for some of the previous city-building games, SimCity included, has been spectacular over the years. Today, resolutions are often high enough to allow artists to really go wild. And heck, even a hybrid 2D/3D game (fixed perspective, 3D models) would've been far more manageable than what Caesar IV has brought us. It's not about 3D graphics being bad per-se, but about the developer's enthusiasm to give us a "free-roaming" 3D environment at the expense of it being user-friendly. If you're not a big fan of Tangram, stay clear of Caesar IV. The triangle won't fit.
There are so many different things that Tilted Mill could've done with the series, but they chose to give us the same old thing, and disregard all the innovations that have already been made just so they could say their game was in full 3D. And for someone who has been waiting so long for a worthy sequel in the genre, I must say I feel cheated. Insulted, even.
Bottom Line: Same lady in a new dress, and the dress doesn't fit.