Pros: Challenging, absorbing, and gorgeously rendered
Cons: You may not surface for hours

With the frenzy, justifiably, building over the release of Pharaoh, leave us not forget the zenith (to date) of the City Building Series sequence that fathered the genre, Caesar III.

C3 is to C2 what the Concorde is to a Wright-Curtiss biplane; and C2 was itself very good indeed.

Unlike the relentless sandbox formula of SimCity 3000, C3 contains objectives, promotions, a lush palette (we are talking diabetic levels of eye-candy here, people), a greater degree of interactivity, real victories and defeats (one of the greatest annoyances of SimCity is that you don't even have to worry about elections; I'll take my politics straight, thanks, a la Shadow President / CyberJudas, both great in their day), no cheesy aliens (as between aliens and Olympians, I can tell you which I prefer), trade, and ... combat.

In other words, this is not a sandbox game, and the stakes are high. ('Sandbox,' for newbies, means there are no real winners or losers, no objectives, no true defeats. It works well enough in, say, The Sims, which is essentially a toy - albeit a fun one - for frustrated screenwriters who've seen The Truman Show one time too often. It does not work in a strategy game.) Even with the patch / update options released since my review first came out, which include turning off Olympian disasters and setting difficulty levels, this remains a game to play to win. The alternative is starting as a running back at the Coliseum against the visiting Lions (16 - 0 this season so far).

The whole motif here is the actual Roman cursus honorem, the many-runged ladder of public service whereby a young aspirant can find himself suddenly trying desperately to hold down a mutinous province and govern it so as to satisfy the Emperor. (Um, anyone seen Maximus lately? As I say, defeat is not an option). And in keeping with Vergil's sense of Rome's destiny, 'to spare the humble, but the proud / With war to overthrow,' you may want to keep an eye out for Margaret Thatcher - I mean Boudicca - or the elephants on the Alpine horizon....

Yes, in addition to the city-planning aspect that appeals to your inner architect / policy wonk, you get, dear player, to fight. Hannibal, for instance, complete with elephants. I will tell you now that the more you know of the Classical and Hellenistic periods, the more you will appreciate this game and its historical quality (especially in such areas as Roman tactics), but the merest tyro in these areas will still be able to have a whale of a time without ever having gotten closer to a page of Cicero or Suetonius than the nearest pizza parlor. This is a richly designed, challenging, and infinitely playable game in which I have yet to find a serious bug or any substantive flaw. Highly recommended.