Digital Trends

Zeus - Master of Olympus

Updated 9-20-2000Let's get something straight right now: I have never played a city builder in my life (well except for loading SimCity a few times solely to unleash natural disasters on thriving cities bwahahahaha!!!). After watching countless empires of mine rise and fall, I know I will never even sit on a city planning board. My hat's off to the boys and girls who keep our civilization running because, frankly, I'd be cutting off heads about 30 minutes into my tenure. For those of you not familiar with the genre, let's take a quick peek at the world of Zeus and see if we can't explain it a bit better. In Zeus you are given command of a piece of land and instructed to build a mighty city on it. Sometimes you'll have normal goals (raise a certain amount of money or have a certain population) and other times the stakes may be a bit higher (defend your city from monsters and the wrath of gods). All that and you are also being pestered by your city's inhabitants. "We want clean water!""We want food and shelter!""Stop the monsters that are killing us!"Buncha babies. I tell ya...for a guy with no particular political leanings, I was feeling pretty Republican.But Zeus takes city builders to the next level. Not only will you be concerned with building the city, but what happens to it after it is built is just as important. The scenarios are connected in arcing storylines and the user will also be able to colonize new settlements away from the parent city.The scenarios involved in the beta include The Pelopennesian War and The Labors of Hercules.The instruction manual is presently just shy of being 200 pages long. Thats's almost 200 pages more than I care to read. Not to fear, however. The learning curve isn't too steep, but mastering this game could take a while and I wish you the best of luck.Now if it only had a Deathmatch mode...Previous InformationThe city builder genre gets a well-deserved shot of freshness with the advent of Zeus Master of Olympus.In this RTS the player controls the people and resources of villages in different scenarios and attempts to keep their populace prosperous. Among the various random occurances are monster attacks and acts of a more divine nature. Players will find themselves not only striving to please their people, but appease the gods as well.In Zeus the player will find himself less concerned with the actual construction of a city than with what he will do with it afterward. Indeed, many of the scenarios require attention to the maintenance of a city and its relationship with neighboring cities. From conquest to occasional tributes, this game boasts a superior AI that should challenge the most seasoned of gamers.From the gameplay that I saw at ECTS, this promises to be one of the most complex RTS yet and by the screenshots, I'm sure you'll agree it's one of the prettiest yet.-Charon