Video Game Review: Citadelum
My opinions on a city builder with light combat mechanics
I spent a good chunk of time playing around with the game Citadelum this week, and I figured it’s been a while since I was able to review a video game on this blog (despite my promises otherwise, apologies). I’ve never really taken a major interest in real-time strategy games. There are major pockets of classicists whose first love of the field came from Age of Empires or Age of Mythology, but my brain isn’t wired to process that many moving pieces at the same time. I did attempt to review the game 0 A.D. a few months ago as well and it was very pretty and well designed, but it generally had the same hallmarks of the genre that I dislike. Micromanagement puts a massive drag on any game I have to play, and if I’m going to learn a bunch of hotkeys, I would prefer to prioritize learning Excel or Photoshop over a video game.
Citadelum takes a different approach. The gameplay is split unevenly into what we’ll call thirds. The bulk of this is dedicated to building one’s own settlement in a manner not dissimilar to something like SimCity. For a majority of the scenarios, this first portion of the gameplay is generally low-stakes and chill, allowing the player to accrue the necessary resources to facilitate trade and develop their scouts on the larger map. “Happiness” is the metric that determines the level of density of plebeian and/or patrician housing in a given development. There are basic “nutritional” requirements (i.e. carrots and cabbages) that the villas must have access to in order to grow in this way, but the general decoration of the vicinity must rise to a certain level of allure to level the housing up. It’s probably been nearly two decades since I’ve touched a SimCity game, and I know they do something similar in terms of making housing desirable, but as far as I remember it wasn’t a core game mechanic as much as it was something to balance out with access to amenities. Citadelum prohibits the player from leveling up in certain areas until they hit those necessary benchmarks, which prevents the spamming of newer villas as a cheap way out.
Another mechanic that requires careful attention is the favor of the gods. As a polytheistic society, this game sort of throws the Euthyphro question out of the window and takes the position that some things are loved by some gods and not by others. You have to maintain a good balance of faith by honoring each represented member of the pantheon in different ways. If you do, they’ll bestow certain boons on your town. If not, they’ll come in and wreck your stuff. This isn’t all that hard of a task to accomplish and, frankly, mastery of it sort of overtakes the difficulty of other aspects of the game, but it’s still something to keep in mind while playing.
The last major mechanic is the battling system. Occasionally other civilizations will come to your citadel if it looks undefended, but for the most part the fighting takes place in big, open fields on the road. You get to choose what troops to deploy and in what formation from the pool of recruits you’ve already hired, but from that point on the battlefield is mostly automated. This is sort of paired with the trade/scouting mechanic into the endgame of the map. Adding battle mechanics to a city builder gives its campaigns a degree of finality, which in turn provides a deeper sense of accomplishment in the player. You’re not just hitting an arbitrary size or revenue goal; you beat out another settlement for control over the region.
If you’re into the city builder genre this is a no-brainer pickup for the reasons I just listed. Parts of Citadelum plugged into my nostalgia dendrites with memories of Roller Coaster Tycoon and Atlantis Underwater Tycoon that I’d forgotten I rented from the library in my youth. Visually the game is beautiful and accurate, and the way it encourages city density and zoning gives me the same feel as walking through somewhere like Pompeii. The RTS aspects are minimal, and enough for me to handle, but if that’s what you’re coming for look elsewhere. This game doesn’t have a massive replayability factor, but the studio behind it has been pumping out new maps every few months, and the Steam Workshop allows users to create customized campaigns and share them with others. One star.