After playing the new city building game Citadel at just over four hours, I can definitively say it’s suitable for a specific kind of person: those obsessed with the Roman Empire.
The game is set in ancient Rome and was launched on Thursday for Windows PC. It’s generally a fairly standard city builder – you collect resources, place buildings and roads and explore the map – but with the ancient Roman twist everything takes on a slightly more blissful and sinister atmosphere.
In Citadelinstead of putting a castle in the center of your town, you put a forum. You can build aqueducts, water mills and reservoirs. As an alternative to the genre’s standard housing, which is typically differentiated by size, in Citadelbuild your Plebeian (commoner) and Patrician (aristocratic) homes, depending on whether you need workers or to collect taxes. You get the point.
To unlock new buildings, you’ll need to level up your city by recruiting a certain number of Plebeians and Patricians – and you’ll need both to keep your city running. To make the Plebeians happy, make sure they have jobs. To keep the Patricians happy, make sure they have enough entertainment to fill their days. If you don’t keep both hives busy, things can get a bit murderous, with a pop-up notification telling you that someone has been murdered in your town.
To satisfy your patrician population, you can choose from a number of leisure and entertainment activities. You can build baths and wineries – or you can train actors, gladiators and chariots and then build theatres, arenas or a Circus Maximus in which they can perform.
However, your residents are not the only ones you need to appease. In true ancient Roman fashion you can build temples for the gods: Minerva, Mars, Jupiter, Pluto, Apollo and Ceres. Once their place of worship is built, increase the level of belief in that god by organizing a festival in their honor or offering a sacrifice. In the latter case, you can choose an animal or decide to sacrifice any number of Plebeians and Patricians. If you do this, you can please the god and bless your city.
If you decide to look outside your city, you can explore the map and set up trade routes with other Roman cities you come across. This is a way to collect luxury materials such as marble and silk. You can then choose to send these resources to Rome (the ultimate goal in many of the missions).
There is still much to discover Citadel — I’ve barely made a dent in the total 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 want to serve only the patricians, or be an emperor for the people.
Citadel was released on PC on October 17. The game was reviewed on PC using a download code from Abylight Studios. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions on products purchased through affiliate links. You can find Additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy can be found here.