Caesary follows in the footsteps of other popular online free-to-play Asian strategy games like Evony. Here, the theme is one of Roman conquest and the art design for your budding Empire reflects this. Other than the visual style and occasional animal sacrifice, Caesary plays like an Empire-building game from any other era.

The first thing you will notice with Caesary is that the sheer amount of things happening on your screen. In the bottom left hand corner of the screen is your portrait and a half dozen stats about your city and account. In addition, there are four other buildings already built and active before you even click your mouse for the first time. Each of those pre-build buildings has an output displayed in the bottom right corner of the screen. The bottom right displays an intimidating number of it’s own stats and all of them are more important than anything else happening on the screen. Despite the “quest” system which tries to reward you with tutorial-like objectives, it’s quite a lot to take in at first.

While your little palace sits comfortably at the center of your town, it’s very easy to lay down a half-dozen buildings in various places without really understanding what any of them do. For example, on my first play-through I built too many cottages in the first five minutes of the game. Luckily, a new player can’t do too much damage to themselves by building the wrong structures because all the essential structures are already made for you. These pre-built buildings lay the foundation for your resource management system in the game. These buildings are the farm, sawmill, iron mine and quarry. Although all resources are neccessary, the farm and sawmill are far more important than the other two resources.

The pre-built buildings always tick away doing work, but it’s up to you as the player to upgrade them or create more jobs in order increase their production. However, you can not create as many jobs as you want or upgrade everything all at once. You can only train a handful of new employees or upgrade a couple buildings at a time. After you have done those two activities, there is simply nothing for you to do with your city until later. After the first day of playing when you can build a half dozen buildings at the same time, Caesary is all about only doing two things at a time and forcing the player to wait about fifteen minutes after doing anything.

In fact, this is the main design decision that you will notice if you have played other free-to-play Asian Empire-building games. Rather than encouraging players to que up a lot of actions and then wait until the next day to play again, Caesary’s game design highly encourages players to play absent-mindedly several times per hour throughout the day. This makes Caesary a great game to play secretly while you are at work, but a terrible game to play when you actually want to do more than two things at a time.

Players who choose to play at work will be grateful that there is almost no sound effects or music other than an innocent sounding chime when a building completes. No one will know you’re playing a game if there’s no sound right? Everyone else will be disappointed at the complete silence the game offers most of the time.

The eventual goal of all your city building is to invade your neighbors. During the first week of real-life time, you are safe to build as you like. After that time has ended you are vulnerable to invasion. If your city is invaded and you fail to defend it, you must pay a small tax to the player who defeated you until you can get your independence back. It isn’t an especially bad penalty for being conquered, but the benefit to the winner is much larger than the loss to the loser. This makes players relatively brave at attacking other players.

Both combat and city building are heavily effected by buff items which can be purchased for real life money or won randomly from sacrificing goats. However, these buffs never feel mandatory and most players don’t use them.

All of this is well and good, but Caesary has some problems that need addressing. While playing Caesary, I encountered several bugs. One bug allowed me to receive double-rewards for every quest I had ever completed. A design flaw allows one person with multiple free accounts to accumulate a much bigger army than anyone could with a single account. Another strange design decision is the requirement of real-life money to use the built-in chat room. The game actually rewards you with items for submitting opinions and bug reports, so we may see these flaws disappear in time.

Ultimately, Caesary is a game that will appeal to a small crowd of people looking for a distraction while multi-tasking. Caesary is truely free in that real-life money is not required to excel in Caesary but the game doesn’t offer enough engaging play sessions to warrent that patience.