Great city building game for fans of the genre. No new ground broken here, but definitely worth a buy.
The graphics are spot on for a city building game. The high resolution and effects certainly make this game stand up to others. What I like most is the overall art style that really does look the way Roman settlements would have looked like. There is a lot of brown and the graphics look 'weathered' for the gritty every day Roman feel. As your city grows dirt roads turn into paved streets, and the houses get upgraded; but no matter how much your city grows, you always get the feel of an ancient city. Lots of stone and dirt really add to the ambience.
There are many buildings at your disposal and thankfully they thought to put the radius of influence on each building so you can see just exactly how far its influence reaches. A nice touch would have been to give special functions to most buildings, such as they did with the Circus Maximus whereby you can hold chariot races at your discretion. The only quiblle I have is that you can't easily tell what is holding your houses back from evolving as you could in the Caesar games. You just have to keep building monuments and buildings around your houses until they evolve without really ever knowing which you need to build.
One of the things I really do like are the 'tablets' which act as special events. Some times a tablet will ask you to build something and sometimes it will grant special abilities like increased wheat production for the next five minutes. You pull three tablets at a time and work on fullfilling its wishes.
I especially like how Rome is much more of a patron in this game than in the Caesar games, where Rome was always demanding more wine and punishing you for not producing. War is much better abstracted here. I want a city game not a war simulation. However, war was a part of everyday life and the game certainly gives you the feeling of sending out your warriors to battle the barbarians with out having to pick formation they will use or what style of fighting to use.
In summary, Imperium Romanum is a must buy for city building fans. There honestly isn't anything wrong with this game, although there may not be anything terrible new here. What it does, it does exceptionally well.