Walls of Rome is a historical strategy video game that was developed and published by Mindcraft in 1993. The game is all about combat between the Roman Empire and its enemies—all done in real time format. What makes this game stand out is that it gives great attention to detail and there is a variety of commands for you to use. Yet, those aspects make this game a bit more complicated than the average strategy game. Luckily, the developers included an in-game tutorial.
When you begin the game, you can play just a single battle to dive into an all-out campaign. In single battle mode the main goal of this quick game is to simply kill the enemy. If you choose the campaign mode, which is a series of related battles, strategy becomes part of the game. The game is historically accurate, down to the location and units used in battle. A built in editor is a nice feature of the game. It lets you edit battle units and the location where the battle will occur. This feature gives Walls of Rome great replay value, which some strategy games don’t have.
The armies represented in this game are: The Celts, the Iberians, the Numidians, the Parthians, the Phoenicians, and the Romans.
Each army has unique characteristics and units. The different kinds of units include “normal” ones such as Archers and Swordsmen which are used by the Parthians. But the Phoenicians keep away from the normal ones, as they use elephants. It takes a variety of skills to master the different kinds of units used by each army, especially in how to interact with other armies’ units.
You start out a battle by gathering your troops to one location and then supply them with weapons. There are a variety of weapons you can use including catapults, roman fire, and the massive ballista (it’s that huge apparatus that sends stones and other projectiles flying towards the enemy). Next, you need to give commands to your units. Then the fighting begins and you can watch the battle take place. If you want to change a command, you can pause the battle, issue a different command, and then un-pause the battle.
If you are new to the strategy genre, this might not be the ideal game for you to start out with due to its high learning curve with the many commands that have to be learned. Yet, if you are a die-hard strategy game player, then you’ve hit the jackpot with this game. Especially if you love a challenge, Walls of Rome is a must-download.
