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Zeus: Master of Olympus is the sixth game in the award-winning Impressions City Building Series, which has sold over two million copies worldwide. Zeus: Master of Olympus, set in a mythological ancient Greece, serves up a world filled with the likes of Hercules, Athena, Ares, Medusa, the Minotaur, and many others. Players build and rule Greek city-states while summoning heroes and gods to protect their land from monsters and other Greek cities. Easy to learn, and quick to get in and out of, Zeus promises to be one of the most fun city-building games of 2000.
Review
The folks at Impression Games have produced their best game yet with Zeus. By keeping the game simple, with clear goals and some great new elements, they've improved the series and the genre. The successful mantra for Zeus is keeping it simple on the surface, but allowing hardcore gamers to explore the depth. The interface is much improved from Pharaoh; the missions are shorter and the goals clearer, but the quantity of missions and gameplay has been increased. Setting up a successful city is easier, though creating a perfect city is still difficult. The gods are much less of a pain in the ass; now they go about trying to curry favor with the people as opposed to punishing them. Everything isn't roses, though, because there are still mythological bad guys to be dealt with. The city-building series has been popular before, but we think Zeus has the potential to blow this series up big-time.The realtime strategy genre can be split into two groups: the war games like Star Craft and Age of Empires and the others. Now, the group of others isn't just some collection of weird failures; quite the contrary, this group includes games like The Sims, Roller Coaster Tycoon and Sim City. As well as the games that make up Impression's city-building series: Caesar, Pharaoh and now Zeus. Every iteration of the series has been an incremental evolution in quality -- Pharaoh was good, but Zeus is great.
The first thing anyone familiar with Caesar and Pharaoh will notice about Zeus is the simplicity of the interface. One criticism of Pharaoh involved the confusing pseudo-hieroglyphic buttons. Zeus has simple icons that not only follow the Greek theme, but are easily recognizable: A cog represents industry and a vase distribution. That level of simplicity carries forward throughout the entire interface. It's much easier for the novice to pick up the game and start playing, especially with the great tutorials.
The gameplay itself has been streamlined as well. Perhaps realizing that most players want to see the special buildings like theaters, parks, large shrines and developed housing, the amount of administrative support services has been decreased. It's much simpler to take care of the required low-level activities and get on to increasing the appeal of the city. It's as if the Greeks have a simpler, more relaxed lifestyle than the Egyptians. The Greek gods protect them for the most part, make the cities better and fight mythological creatures. Overall gameplay is a bit more relaxed; as a player it's much easier to sit back and watch city life, to take time to follow the walkers as they move through the city or watch entertainers perform. There are so many different animations that even the hardcore sim fan will want to sit back and enjoy the show a bit.
The best improvements to the game are the improved campaign structure and sandbox modes. There are multiple campaigns, each divided into smaller missions. The level of difficulty is part of the campaign description, ranging from easy to challenging. Combine the campaign difficulty with the five levels of game difficulty and the variations should allow anyone to play. The missions themselves are much smaller, so players can pick up the game and play for 10 hours or 30 minutes, depending on their schedule. Campaign cities carry over from one mission to another, which is much more satisfying than constantly building up cities and then abandoning them. Cities form colonies, which are where new city building takes place; the primary city is still active, and the campaign will invariably swing back to allow further development.
Clearly the very best new additions are the three sandbox modes, which remove the storyline from the game, giving players the option to just create cities and enjoy their evolution. Economic sandbox gives the player a goal of fiscal domination of Greece; military sandbox sets up a goal of military domination; and open sandbox is an amazing map with all resources and the freedom of doing anything.
There is a minor amount of violence in Zeus as the gods fight with beasts or your army defends your city, but in general it's nothing like normal resource-based realtime strategies, making the game ideal for people who want a holiday title with less bloodshed.
There are a few problems with Zeus; every title has 'em. The full install is pretty large for such a simple game -- 620 MB -- and at times there were a few strange slowdowns in the game. Overall, we had no compatibility problems and can't see what would need to be patched -- a refreshing change for the season.
While the material isn't as familiar to most players as the theme parks of Roller Coaster Tycoon or the modern life of The Sims, we found Zeus to be just as enjoyable a game. If controlling the development of a civilization was ever an interest, this is a game to try -- and if you've already played these types of games, you definitely don't want to miss this one. -- DailyRadar Review
