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Zeus First Impression

By Elliott Chin, GameSpotPosted Jun 30, 2000 7:07 pm PT

Elliott Chin takes an early look at an alpha of Zeus, Sierra's latest empire-building game.

The City Building series from Impressions Studios is one of Sierra's most successful strategy franchises. The venerable Caesar series and the recent Pharaoh game all were part of the City Building line. All have been strategy-management games in the vein of SimCity, but with historical settings and a scope that sometimes reached just beyond civic works. In Caesar, for example, there were military units to create, and in Caesar II, there was even a tactical battle map in which you waged war against rival city-states. And Pharaoh threw in the annual flooding of the Nile to add greater nuance to your strategic planning. However, both series of games were still too complicated at times for some gamers, and so Sierra and Impressions have created another game in the City Building series that Sierra touts as "the easiest of the City Builders."

This next game is Zeus, and it moves the series to a Grecian setting. It also simplifies a lot of the gameplay from the previous games. However, the general premise is the same. You start out with a bare plot of land, and you must build a city there and make it thrive. Various scenarios, called adventures, have set victory conditions such as raising the population to 500 or drawing enough heroes to stem the invasion of a medusa. In this aspect, the game is like Pharaoh: You have a series of scenarios to complete, thereby giving you a sense of accomplishment and an obvious way to measure your success throughout the game. You can build various types of buildings throughout the terrain, but you must resort to a build order to support the different buildings. For instance, you need to build roads first before you build houses, because the houses need to be connected to the other buildings in the city. Such interconnection between buildings is not new to games of this ilk, but in Zeus, it is less complex. As in previous games, you need workers to support certain buildings, but in Zeus, you no longer have to ensure that you have an unobstructed road from house to building in order for that building to be staffed with the proper number of workers - just having enough houses and workers does the job. If the goal is to make the game easier for newcomers, then this simplification indeed helps.

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