After playing the new city-builder game Citadelum for just over four hours, I can definitively say that it’s right for a specific kind of person: those who are obsessed with the Roman Empire.
The game is set in Ancient Rome and was launched on Thursday for Windows PC. It is, overall, a pretty standard city-builder — you gather resources, place buildings and roads, and explore the map — but with the Ancient Roman twist, everything takes on a slightly more beatific and sinister air.
In Citadelum, instead of placing a castle at the center of your city, you place a Forum. You can build aqueducts, water mills, and reservoirs. As an alternative to the standard housing of the genre, which is typically differentiated by size, in Citadelum, you build Plebeian (commoner) and Patrician (aristocratic) housing depending on whether you need workers or to collect taxes. You get the point.
To unlock new buildings, you need to level up your city by attracting a certain number of Plebeians and Patricians — and you need them both to keep your city running. To make the Plebeians happy, ensure they have jobs. To make the Patricians happy, ensure they have plenty of entertainment to fill up their days. If you don’t keep both castes occupied, things can get a tad murder-y, with a pop-up notification telling you that someone in your city has been killed.
In order to appease your Patrician population, you can choose from a number of leisure and entertainment activities. You can build baths and wineries — or you can train up actors, gladiators, and chariots, and then build theaters, arenas, or a Circus Maximus for them to perform in.
Your residents aren’t the only ones you have to appease, however. In true Ancient Roman fashion, you can build temples to the gods — Minerva, Mars, Jupiter, Pluto, Apollo, and Ceres. Once their place of worship has been built, you need to raise the faith level in that god by either throwing a festival in their honor or making a sacrifice. In the latter case, you can choose an animal or decide to sacrifice any number of your Plebeians and Patricians. Doing so can please the god and bestow a blessing on your city.
If you decide to look outside of your city, you can explore the map and establish trade routes with other Roman cities that you find. This is a way to gather luxury materials such as marble and silk — then you can choose to send these resources to Rome (the final goal in many of the missions).
There’s still much left to explore in Citadelum — I’ve barely made a dent in the overall content available — but so far it’s a fun take on the genre for history buffs and fans of Ancient Rome alike. The only question that remains is whether you will cater solely to the Patricians, or be an Emperor for the people.
Citadelum was released Oct. 17 on PC. The game was reviewed on PC using a download code provided by Abylight Studios. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
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