Pax Romana review

The map. Yes, it’s from Risk.

Educational television programmes have convinced me that the Romans did indeed do a lot for us. Aside from providing modern humanity with under floor heating, orgies and gladiators, the Roman Empire has been an interest and inspiration for megawatts of creative energy. From Shakespeare to Kubrick, the great creative talents of human history have been drawn to the epic story of Rome, a sophisticated, modern-looking superpower which ruled most of the known world at a time when our ancestors in Britain still preferred wearing blue paint to clothes.

Dreamcatcher are treading conceptually similar ground, then, in releasing Pax Romana. Set during the period 275 to 44BC, the game places you at the head of one of the political factions which govern the Roman republic. There are two modes of play – “Strategic”, in which the political wheeling and dealing is left to the computer while you concentrate on maximising productivity, building armies and conquering things and “Political”, in which you do everything required by the “Strategic” game, but also have to deal with the political machinations of your opponents in an effort to become Emperor for life. An interesting premise, then: combining political manoeuvring with the usual strategy build-grow-invade cycle. Let’s have a look at the game.

A look at the game

A funny thing happened to me on the way to the forum.

Actually let’s not have a look at the game, because the only thing I can imagine which is less appealing than the graphics in Pax Romana is piercing my corneas with rusty hypodermic needles, while doing the Riverdance in a minefield. It’s hideous. There are half-a-dozen well-rendered (if static) navigation screens, which are fairly encouraging. Then you get into the game engine itself and realise that the interface was apparently built using the menu graphics from Age of Empires and a handful of interesting, if illegal, fungi. The menu boxes are enormous and the text is tiny and blurry. The game map, where you spend the majority of your time, has clearly been lifted from the 1940s classic board game Risk and shows as much detail as its cardboard predecessor. This cartoonish map is then liberally strewn with tiny icons depicting military units, towns and so on. These icons all look terrifically similar, so you have to roll your mouse pointer over them and then decipher the (tiny, blurry) text tag that pops up. Visually, this game is miserably poor. I would have expected the graphics engine from Civilisation to have been updated by now, but this appears to be a vain hope...

Oh well. There’s more to any great game than graphics; I’m the first to admit that Quake looks abysmal now, but still provides a concentrated hit of high-speed action adrenalin, when required. Perhaps a longer acquaintance with Pax Romana will reveal hidden depths?

Bring on the Babel fish

This is a naval battle in progress. No, really.

I should point out at this juncture that the greatest challenge faced by any would-be Emperor is not rampaging Carthaginians nor Cato’s insistence on having your political candidates beaten up. It’s trying to work out how to play the game in the first place. The gamer’s usual first port of call for information, the manual, was evidently translated into English by a monolingual Korean rice-husker using Google. It’s peppered with almost-but-not-quite nonsensical gems like “If the people of Rome is too much displeased with your management of the Republic, he may riot to revolution and slaughter you and your fellow Senators” and fails to answer any but the most basic questions about the game’s structure and objectives.

The in-game tutorials suffer from the same free-swinging attitudes towards the Queen’s English, and are further improved by the fact that they guide you with the usual enormous yet curiously unreadable text boxes I mention above. Oh, and in one memorable case, a tutorial about the political game asks you to finish it and return to the main menu by clicking on a button that the developers forgot to create. Which is nice.

Man is by nature a political animal

Diplomacy in action...

Assuming you have the saint-like patience to wade through the poor documentation, uninformative tutorials and shoddy graphics, there is actually some interest to be had from the game. The “Political” mode pits you against five other factions and runs on an annual cycle. At the start of a new year, the Senate has just been elected and the pre-eminent faction gets to declare wars, sign peace treaties, set the level of taxation and so on. You spend the year building your influence in regions loyal to your faction, opening trade routes with other friendly regions, and raising armies to vanquish invaders or add to your territory.

As the year goes by, you accumulate money and political influence, which can then be used in the run-up to elections in winter. You can increase popular support by buying bread for the people or putting on games and plays. You can threaten violence to influence voting patterns and if all else fails (and you have any money left) you can bribe representatives into voting for you. Once the elections are held and the new political order is decided, you can then start the process of bolstering your position once more, aiming for promotion next year.

Veni, Vidi, got bored and went home

The people are revolting.

The trouble with all this is that while the political element of the game is interesting, original and (mainly) well-constructed, the strategic side (the bit on the Risk map) is dull as dishwater. In fact, it’s so dull that writing about it caused me to suffer some kind of narcoleptic attack and end up facedown in my keyboard. It’s not that (beyond the vile graphics and impenetrable interface) it’s poorly-executed, just that it’s very formulaic; it does exactly what you’d expect it to do, does exactly what strategy games have been doing for fifteen years, and leaves you feeling slightly frustrated and itching to get back to the Machiavellian politicking which forms the core of the game.

I cannot imagine why anybody would eschew the “Political” mode in favour of the “Strategic” game, unless they’re not prepared to deal with the game’s documentation... In the “Strategic” game you can march your armies all over the globe, on the premise that you have total control over the Empire, but it’s rather unfulfilling. The combat system is rather disappointing; although you have the freedom to micromanage your armies’ composition, tactics and leadership, the outcome of battles seems to be governed by a roll of the dice rather than any player input and the battles themselves are represented by a low-quality animation of two single soldiers hacking at each other with swords. Occasionally (for no good reason that I can establish) tiny, under-trained and ill-fed enemy armies seem capable of vanquishing legion after legion, which can be most frustrating in a scenario that only lasts twenty years.

Perhaps the Visigoths had a point

Overall, I cannot in good faith recommend this game to you. Although Pax Romana’s detailed recreation of political Rome is very interesting and brought to life with admirable complexity, the fact that it’s attached to a not-very-distinguished strategy game increases the workload to the point where it’s not possible to enjoy both facets of the game. The learning curve, hampered by comically poor documentation and badly-executed tutorials, is almost vertical. All told, this game is a long run for a short slide.