Rome: Caesar's Will is about as entertaining as being boiled alive, and is just as fun. I do not exaggerate... much.
What Caesar’s Will attempts to do is to be a historical murder mystery. As everyone knows (or should know), Julius Caesar, the Roman emperor, was murdered in the Roman senate by his best friends, including Brutus, et cetera. In the game, you control an ordinary centurion called Hercules (yes, and I bet everyone laughed at him at school), who has been tasked with finding Caesar’s will, which has quite naturally gone missing. Just shows Caesar didn’t look after it well enough. I have no idea why such an important task was delineated to a mere centurion of the legion, but there you are. You move, albeit awkwardly and patchily around Rome, questioning different people in an attempt to find the will. Now, Caesar’s Will has only two real strengths. First, it is completely historically accurate in the details it gives about life at the time, and relationships between Caesar and his friends, so it could in theory teach you a fair bit about that period. The only other thing I can think of is that the CD and box are very nicely presented.
Apart from those two things, Caesar’s Will is almost utterly terrible and boring. The graphics, both during the short, infrequent cutscenes (which are melodramatic in the excess) and during the rest of the game, are almost 2 dimensional in their appearance. Movement is stupid, consisting of point-and-click from a locked position, which is perfectly good for Monkey Island, but is executed very poorly here. Voice acting is uniformly awful, lacking in any emotion, sounding drab and listless. Hercules booming laugh irritated me most of all. All background music and sounds loop obviously after twenty seconds. There are no initiatives that motivate you to solve any problem, apart from the 'honour' of finding the will.
After the half hour I played Caesar’s Will on Christmas Day, I was almost emotionally scarred by the experience. I felt cheated out of 30 minutes which could have been used for fun, instead of gallivanting around a two-dimensional ancient Rome, talking to the dullest characters, and attempting to find a will which seemed to be moving around by itself. I did not bother to complete the game, as I frankly did not care in any way whatsoever, whether Hercules found the will or not. It was uninstalled on Boxing Day, and has not been played since, except for one instance to check something for this very review. It had not improved in the meantime.
Now, if you do happen to see a copy of this game (although the chances of that are next to zero), lurking at the back of the top shelf in your local games store, covered in dust, I beg you to leave it there to rust in peace. No one should have to suffer the absolutely mind-numbing boredom that this game presents. It’s not even particularly educational, so there is really no conceivable reason to buy it, apart from some kind of mental torture technique. Now that I have let the world know the terrible nightmare that is Rome: Caesar’s Will, I can go and have lunch with my conscience at peace.