Review: Pax Romana

Strategy games vary in complexity. Some are simple: Mine resources, build buildings, smite the foe. Some are more complex, perhaps adding some city management or upgrade trees. Standing at the top of the Tower of Complexity like King Kong are the Empire Manager games, works that demand balancing the creation of a powerful army, running every city in the realm, and ensuring the neighbors don't attack. At their best, these giant, barrel-throwing creatures hide their complexity under several layers of helpful information management windows that seduce, dragging the unwary into a world of elegant spreadsheets. One minute you're waving a hand, sending armies hither and yon, and the next minute, through no fault of your own, you're crouched over a spreadsheet detailing grain futures in an obscure province in the backwater of the empire. And deeply, deeply passionate about it. Pax Romana is an attempt to climb the mighty Tower and stand with the Great Apes, but a buggy release, reams of unorganized data, and complication for complication's sake conspire to make it just another man in a monkey suit. Kids, don't try these extended metaphors at home.

Troubles abound from the beginning. Upon installing the game, it demands to be rebooted; quite a shock to someone on Windows XP Professional, which usually installs without a peep. This is not Windows' idea, though, this is Pax Romana's idea. It must be rebooted for the copy protection to kick in; which leads me to wonder why it is that the huge AAA titles don't have irritating copy protection, it's the other ones. The geek in me mumbled, "Reboot for a GAME? Is this Windows 98?" before sighing and restarting. The copy protection checks itself every single time the game is run, which means starting a game requires: staring at the screen for a few seconds while the copy protection checks itself, then waiting for the game to start, Escaping out of the opening cutscene, staring at the screen for 10 seconds while the loading screen appears, clicking into a new game, waiting 20 seconds for it to load, then staring at the screen full of information, saying "Bugger that!," and going to get a beer. Those last few steps are probably optional, but definitely worth following.

There's a motto around the Old Firm that states "When even the tutorial is bugged, you're in a whole mess of trouble." And the tutorial is bugged and it is a whole mess of trouble. There are nine tutorials, each of the "read the directions and press the button the arrow is pointing to variety," pretty standard stuff and informative, if dry. The problem arises with the whole arrow pointing-button pushing part. Arrows frequently appear in random parts of the screen pointing to nothing in particular and, although it's probably not intended, this usually occurs about 2/3 of the way through the tutorial when everything is just beginning to make sense. The only solutions are clicking frantically at every available button until something works or quitting the whole tutorial and starting over from the beginning.

The art bugs do not end there, oh no. In the scenarios, windows with important information pop up from time to time to convey important details like ships being sunk, trade routes ending, and so forth. Unfortunately, the text in these windows sometimes just isn't there, so a poetic popup of a sinking ship is all that remains. Oddly, armies can disappear through attrition, but this isn't important enough to merit its own working popup, so entire armies may disappear if not carefully monitored. It could be argued that this is historical precedent based on the mysterious disappearance of the Ninth Legion, but it's doubtful the developers were that cunning. Fonts also change sizes on a random basis, making some of the message popups very difficult to read.

The bugs are not game-killing, it's the scenarios that make it a real pain. Scenarios range from the Punic Wars to the conquest of Gaul and all are huge empire-developers. There's no small starting scenarios to let would-be rulers of the world get their feet wet. They range from a huge conquest of Gaul scenario to a mind-bogglingly huge Punic Wars scenario. The scenarios aren't in themselves terrible, it's being confronted with 100 provinces to manage down to the last detail straight out of the tutorial that's terrible. There are no easy scenarios to start with; an ideal one would be a Unification of Rome setup where all there is to manage is one province and players can expand from there. I know it's called Pax Romana, which means it takes place in the later part of the Empire, but when have we ever let names get in the way of a good game?

And you better like the Romans, because the barbarian factions aren't really represented. There's no chance to play the Conquest of Gaul as the Gauls, for example. Half the fun of the big Empire Manager games is picking some obscure little country to run. In one particular game of Europa Universalis-probably the gold standard-that I particularly enjoyed, the Dutch stood astride the world from their base in New York with a mighty American empire, even though Holland had fallen to the vile French hundreds of years before. And there's no Expand From One Province to Rule The World mode and just what is the point of a Rome game without one of those? The Romans are the most awesome imperialist power in history, if I can't slowly expand from Italy to rule the world with them, what's the point? Pax Romana should be called Rome Part II: The Later Years, because all the fun conquests have been done.

Another joy-killer, or at least a joy-staggering-around-wounded-er, is Pax Romana's use of real-time instead of a turn-based system. Making plans for a hundred provinces, then having everything go wrong at once, is just not fun. The best way to play is liberal use of the pause button, making for a de facto turn-based game where none existed before. Very little is more intimidating than starting a new scenario and studying the map to see a huge empire full of provinces, all of which need managed and tweaked and hand-held, though to add an extra bit of pressure, the clock is running. Fun!

Wrapped around all this is a complicated political system that has all the fun of high school class elections and is just as pointless. Whoa, Senate voting! Will the mad crazy fun never end? Some bugs may be remedied with a promised patch, but given the history of patches, there's a 50-50 chance they won't be touched at all. Pax Romana is am ambitious game, to be sure, but still falls flat in the execution. Centurion: Defender of Rome for the Genesis still stands astride a smoldering heap of weak Rome games, laughing and calling out challenges.