It's a Myth
Written: May 06 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Good sound, good city building system and management.
Cons: It's all rehashed material.
The Bottom Line: Only a good game for those who’ve never played Caesar III or Pharaoh. If you have you should avoid unless you're obsessed. Mythological buffs should run a mile.
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| apoeze's Full Review: Zeus: Master of Olympus for Windows |
Background
I love simulation (sim) games and have played most of them over the years. I have played many city building sims including Simcity classic, 2000 and 3000 as well as the Sierra games of Caesar I, II and III as well as Pharaoh. I did not play the Pharaoh expansion; Cleopatra.
Performance
The minimum requirements are very modest requiring a Pentium 166 and 32MB RAM. You do not require a 3D card. This game has no multiplayer capability. The game ran fairly smoothly on my system although occasional slowdown was noticed.
I did not detect a single bug in this game. Installation of the game was simple and without problems.
The Game
Zeus – Master of Olympus is a real time city building game with a fantasy Greek mythological setting. It uses an isometric city view and less often used top down Pan-Hellenic world view.
This game comes on one disk and includes 7 short campaigns they call ‘adventures’ It includes grossly simplified versions of classics like ‘the Trojan War’. There are no single player maps. You play the leader of the city whose name depends on which campaign you are playing. One new addition to Zeus is the fact that you are no longer subject to the whims of an emperor. True to Grecian history you are your own master of a city-state, so now instead you are largely subject to the whims of other city-states.
The storyline in the campaigns isn’t too bad, being very loosely based on Greek mythology but is very weakly developed and really just fills in the gaps between building cities. Zeus has departed from trying to be based on history like its predecessors as the developers decided fun was more important. Unfortunately the ‘fun’ aspect largely fell on its face leaving a shell of botched ‘mythology’ reminding me of the Disney kind of mythological alteration we are so used to.
The product is polished through its predecessors and there is a worthwhile patch to add an extra campaign as well as a well-designed campaign editor.
Graphics
The graphics in the game are quite good and reasonably sharp and detailed with a nice balance of colour. The ‘fun’ attempt of the developers resulted in the graphics being drawn in a slightly cartoonish style with physically questionable angles and curves. I don’t mind it though I felt the graphics in the previous two games was better.
The temples of the gods are nice but they all look far too similar.
The gods and heroes walking the land are reasonably drawn but are so obviously added onto the map (i.e. badly integrated) and suffer very odd extreme slowdowns at times. It degrades the effect to the point where they don’t seem real at all. The monsters don’t look very convincing and in some cases are quite poorly drawn and suffer from the same integration problems described above.
The maps are tile-based and not too bad but are a bit too featureless.
The introductory video was OK, though rather irrelevant to the game, and there are no cut scenes. There is also no night-day transition, fog of war or hidden maps.
Sound
The music was good and added the right atmosphere to the game as well as sporting some limited changes in your circumstances.
The sound effects are excellent with sounds emitted from buildings and events on your city view being relevant and believable. I particularly enjoyed the occasional philosopher comment.
The speech acting during the campaign commentary and from the denizens of your city was excellent. Some of the lines were also excellent and I enjoyed the comments from the body builder most of all.
Gameplay
The game plays nearly identically to Pharaoh and Caesar III but there are a few small differences besides the setting. The gameplay is quite good and comes together fairly well.
Basically you manage taxes and trade in order to build structures which all provide some kind of benefit. Many of the buildings are houses where you focus on satisfying citizens’ needs like food, goods and beauty in order to extract taxes. Most of the other buildings satisfy those needs and release ‘walkers’ which randomly follow roads and will service any buildings they pass. Such structures include tax offices, markets and gymnasiums, just to name a few.
The random ‘walkers’ used to be a real pain often making servicing areas difficult in the predecessors but Zeus appears to have partially fixed this and those problems are much less frequent.
While you make money from taxes it’s often good to supplement it with trade. You employ some of your people in industry to make goods, the range of which will depend on what’s available on the map as well as the supply/demand needs of other cities. These goods are used to satisfy your citizen’s needs and the surplus can be sold for a profit.
The temples, which are effectively a replacement for the pyramids etc of Pharaoh, are much faster to build and do offer some bonuses which depend on the god although the balance in these bonuses is poor. For example the temple of Hermes is much more useful than that of the higher ranking Aphrodite. Most of the Greek gods are missing too includes Zeus’ wife Hera. There are dozens of other inaccuracies and missing pieces in the game too.
The interface is very good and will be familiar to any who have played the predecessors. It is very easy to build and select the actions you wish. The only fault is with army management, which is infuriating at times, especially if the army standards go on the sand.
The maps are 2D but have a very limited height level system, which has no real effect on the game other than variety.
This game is reasonably balanced. The game difficulty varies well with each setting and the game can be made challenging to most players.
The greatest improvement in this latest addition to the series is the world management, which was weak in the other games of the series. You can now found colonies and return to you original settlement. Impressing and offending other city-states now has more of an impact. Successful invasion of a colony will result in a yearly tribute of money or tax paid to your colony. You may also choose to raid colonies for goods. One thing still not improved in world management is that there still is absolutely no tactical management of your armies when away from the city. The troops just battle in a hidden manner with presumably some simple mathematical model deciding the outcome.
There are many other minor changes to the game compared with the others in the series. An animal-based resource system was added. The flood plain system of Pharaoh was dropped (being rather specific to Egypt anyway). The gods actually walk the land blessing buildings as they go, though this is not very well done and blessings are both rare and of minimal value. The lower class and higher class housing was made totally separate. The markets were improved slightly. Trade has become faster, particularly the frustrating sea trade of Pharaoh. Armies are now formed from your actual housing. Armour and horses are needed for the better units. Pan-Hellenic games like the Olympic games have been added so that your culture ‘walkers’ can now compete. However this is superficially done with you never taking part in or seeing those games.
The disasters are very badly done being neither random nor well designed. The campaigns feel very repetitive with little real difference being put into them. The range of goods made seems smaller than the other two games.
Multiplayer
This game is incapable of multiplayer gaming.
Comparisons
It’s practically a clone of Pharaoh and Caesar III in Greek dressing. Also somewhat similar to the Simcity series.
Comments
During my research of this opinion I read a commercial review by GamesDomain. I normally like this site but this particular review was full of cloying grossly positive comments that put the best PR spin on the game. It even rated a silver star.
From the box:
‘City building of Mythological Proportions’ – Does this mean it doesn’t really exist?
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
apoeze
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Location: Adelaide, SA, Australia
Reviews written: 34
Trusted by: 6 members
About Me:
Wile. E. Coyote., Genius. erm not really :-)
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