My Empire: Facebook Game Review - Ancient Rome style city building game

Game Basics (4 out of 5)

This game is a simple city building game that puts you in control of your own ancient village with a Romanesque style theme. Your basic goals are to build structure for your citizens and provide other buildings to keep them happy. This is no easy task and it’s a constant struggle to keep the happiness of your citizens up. You can also hire tax collectors in your growing village to collect income for new building construction. To build some of the larger structures and especially wonders you will need several Facebook friends to help finish the project. Other options include the ability to decorate your village with various objects which will also increase your happiness to a small degree. While you can play the game as a single player you won’t progress very far without including Facebook friends in your game play.

City Building (3 out of 5)

Building your city in the game requires two basic building types. The functional building includes such things as huts, lodges, mills, quarries, and mansions. These buildings provide you with “fame” which allows you to level up and provides addional population for your city. Your functional buildings need to be balanced by your happiness buildings. As your population grows they will become increasingly unhappy without the proper buildings to keep them in line. Happiness buildings include temples, courts, farms, guard towers, and baths. Trying to keep citizens happy can lead to frustration with this game and in the early game you face problems with happiness until you have enough income coming into your city from tax collectors. Some buildings will also take technology to construct which can be acquired once you build an academy at level eight.

Tax Collector (4 out of 5)

To make money in this game you will need to a hire a tax collector. You can hire one by clicking the icon at the bottom left of your screen. There are four different tax collectors one that produces coins in five minutes, four hours, twelve hours, and twenty four hours. The tax collectors at the higher time periods will naturally produce more coins. Only the five minute collector is free while the other ones will cost coins for you to hire.

City Decorations/ Wonders (4 out of 5)

You have several options to make your city look good and these can be found under the decorations tab using the build icon. Decorations will also provide a small amount of happiness for your citizens plus they are cheap to construct unlike many of the larger happiness buildings.

In the game you can also build many of the wonders of the ancient world and this game option takes a play from the civilization game book. Wonders take resources to construct which your quarries and mines will produce slowly once you construct them. Many wonders also take items that only your Facebook friends can gift to you so you need additional help to get these buildings constructed. You can build Stonehenge, The Pyramids, The Great Lighthouse, Hanging Gardens, and a few others. If you spend game cash you can construct a “rare goods pit” which will provide you with one rare item every twenty four hours that you can use in wonder construction.

Conclusion

This game is good but it doesn’t offer anything groundbreaking to the city building genre. It’s not a game you can really play by yourself with quite a few structures requiring help from your Facebook friends. The game does look quite nice and it can be fun to play at times. Having to keep your citizen happy can be problematic especially in the early stages of the game when you don’t have much income to work with.