Zoombinis Maths Journey (PC)

Impressions struck gold with the first game in their 'City Builder' series, Caesar III, an intricate and detailed game in which you constructed and managed a city from scratch in ancient Rome. Although hugely playable, it mainly appealed to hard-core strategy enthusiasts due to the amount of micro-management and dull manipulation of figures. The sequel, Pharaoh, streamlined the game somewhat and removed many of the irritations of the first, although it received something of a lukewarm reception, being hailed as 'Caesar in Egypt', since the gameplay was essentially the same as the first game. Now, we have a third, Zeus - Master of Olympus. Unsurprisingly, ...  Read the complete review

I have never played this genre of game until I picked up a copy of Zeus. I only bought it because it looked pretty! Initially I got a little frustrated trying to keep all my villagers happy but soon got the hang of it! The game revolves around building a city from its meager beginnings into a vast empire, be it military or economic in strength. When you first begin playing Zeus, you can choose to play tutorials, which will enable you to get the feel of how to build and plan your city. Alternatively, you can play an adventure from the list provided, each one consists of five to eight episodes or varying difficulty, which it tells you about before you begin ...  Read the complete review

Firstly this certainly isn't a game involving Zeus. It is a young persons game (probably I would say for between 6-13) which doubles as both very enjoyable and educational. Beginning with the enjoyment, the game consists of getting a group of zoombinis from a base camp to a safe haven at the end. Doing this involves completing several little mini games/challenges all of which require logic and tend to be based around the zoombinis attributes. I.e. zoombinis can have a series of different types of hair, and only one hair type will be allowed along a particular path, etc. Once you have done one group, then you return to the start and do another group and ...  Read the complete review

Zeus is a fun but hard game. You need to play it for a few times before you get the hang of providing the citizens with all that they need and want. It is a lot more interesting than Sim City 3000, as you have more control of the city and you can interact with the citizens. Zeus can be a hard game, however if you use the cheat code "Delian Treasury" you can keep your coffers at around 15,000. To enter the cheat code you need to press ctrl, alt & c at the same time. Without this cheat it can be quite dificult to progress. You need to start small and make sure that all of the houses are surrounded by agoras, maintanence offices and lots of culture venues and ...  Read the complete review

Considering myself to be a bit of a pro when it comes to strategy/ god style games, when I first loaded this up I foolishly decided to skip straight past the tutorials and into the game proper. Unfortunately this proved to be a bit of a mistake as the gameplay is decidedly different to most games of the genre. Perhaps if I'd played any of the earlier games in the series I'd have known what to expect, but inexperienced as I was in the sublime ways of the Impressions strategy game the original "circuit" style of gameplay proved bewildering at first. Swallow pride, back to tutorials. Basically the gameplay revolves around setting your cities up into districts or ...  Read the complete review