Review

I was rather hoping that this would be more fun than it was. For the record, I put three or four sessions into it, getting through the (lengthy, comprehensive) tutorials and a sandbox game or two. What attracted me to Zeus was:

1. the subject matter: ancient Greece
2. the low-stress, slow-paced gameplay
3. the touted campaign structure which is apparently a much better offering than most city/empire building games

By the time I'd gotten through the tutorials, however, one thing had become explicitly clear: this game is not flexible.

What do I mean by 'not flexible'? First, let me describe what is, to me anyway, the attraction of city-building games: freedom and nurture. The freedom aspect typically comes in the ability to carve out and plan an interconnected economic ecosystem, scratching your aesthetic itch as you see fit, within the mechanics of the underlying simulation. In other words - you get to build your city the way you want, putting things where you want, and, in general, being God-like. The nurture aspect is the warm fuzzy that comes from developing your city from its infancy into a thriving, bustling, marvel of civilization, and basking in the musical hem and hue of its citizens. Now then, when I say that Zeus is not flexible, I mean that it keeps the player on a tight leash, not letting them indulge in their aesthetic impulses. The problem arises primarily from the backbone of the game design: walkers.

Zeus, like most of Impression's city games (Caesar III, Pharaoh, etc..) is driven by the concept of people with particular roles walking on the city streets. Resources are distributed and collected by particular types of citizens walking routes through the city. Services are provided by still more particular types of citizens walking routes. For example, crime is controlled in part by watchmen (police) which originate from a watch tower and patrol the streets. When a watchman walks past a house, it's 'civil unrest' counter goes to zero, and then begins to increase over time until the watchman walks past again. Basically everything works this way. Buildings will catch fire or collapse if a superintendent (from a maintenance office) doesn't walk past the building at a regular interval, thus periodically resetting its 'hazard' counter. This simple principle is applied to everything. It makes Zeus both easy to understand and easy to play.

Unfortunately, it also causes the game to demand a degenerative approach. The game boils down to controlling the routes that the walkers take. It seems like the most "efficient" strategy is to create a very dense housing area, encircle it by a single road loop, and provide all of the services and beautification necessary to get the residents to upgrade their houses to the highest level. In parallel to this discrete resident loop, you plop down resource collecting buildings in their obvious areas, put industrial buildings right next to those, and call it good.

If you stop and think about this, it is contrary to how one would design a city, particular in an agrarian, pedestrian-dominated society. Cities would, by necessity, have much finer granularity in their zoning, with more distributed housing, certainly, but in particular with a much more complex web of roads. "So what," you say, "it's just a game." True. Whether or not the cities in Zeus compare favorably to historical development patterns is neither here nor there. Instead, the problem is that, because of the walker mechanic, the player can be either creative or efficient, but not both. And in a city-building game, that isn't a good thing. If I wanted to be efficient, I'd go play an RTS. When I play something like Zeus, I want to be able to sit back, relax, and have some fun with the building blocks and the little people.

So as a city sim, Zeus falls short for me. The other major complaint I have is with the animations. Make no mistake, the game looks great, and there is a ton of detail. Frozen in a screenshot, there's nothing to complain about. The problem is that almost every building has an animation loop that is too short and too cutesy. By 'cutesy', I mean that it's not general enough. Examples: the olive oil booth in the market has a vendor that slips on olive oil and does a somersault, catching the urn of olive oil that he was holding. Sure, that's cute, but it happens over and over and over. That's the only animation that the olive oil booth has. It ends up looking like the vendor is a circus clown, performing his little act ad infinitum. Another example: the armor vendor flips a sword and almost drops it on his foot, then hops around for a bit. Again, he does this - and only this - forever. These animations are too specific. When I paid attention to how the city actually behaved, it very much looked like a bunch of very short, humorous, animation loops playing over and over, instead of fooling me into thinking that I was looking at a bustling city. In this respect, then, Zeus failed as well. The sense of immersion was very fragile and could not withstand anything but the most cursory of glances. That eliminated most of the fun that should have come from just enjoying the activities of the city that I'd built. And since that's why I was playing the game in the first place, I saw no point in continuing.

I didn't get far enough to be able to comment on the reportedly impressive campaign. Frankly, it didn't matter if it was the best thing since sliced bread, because Zeus wasn't working for me on the most basic level.

For the sake of thoroughness, I loaded up Zeus's precursor - Pharaoh, just to see if it could conjure the magic that Zeus couldn't. It did not. Furthermore, the UI was decidedly unrefined compared to Zeus, and I certainly wasn't going to suffer that on top of an equally unfulfilling city building experience.

It's a damn shame, too, because I really wanted to be able to escape to ancient Greece and ancient Egypt, absorbing myself into the nuts and bolts of their respective economies and culture. And in an unfortunate irony, Impression's games have been popular enough that it's unlikely that someone else will see a need to revisit these contexts in an attempt to improve upon the experience.