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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
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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 sed 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
a 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;
sandbox sets up a goal of domination; and open
sandbox is an amazing with all resources and the freedom of
doing anything.
There is a minor a 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