The Switch 2 has a bunch of party tricks, but its mouse controls are all-too-easily overlooked. They really shouldn’t be, when it opens the console up to all sorts of new experiences, or to genres that are just fundamentally better with a mouse in your hand. Enter Citadelum, a Roman city-builder that lets you create your own corner of the Empire and fully embraces Nintendo’s latest console and its pointing-and-clicking skills.
Citadelum offers both an open-ended Sandbox mode and an expansive single-player campaign that takes you on a historical journey beginning in 40BCE – that’s Before Common Era, not Before Consoles Existed – through the rise of the Roman Empire, the Third Punic War, and the Gallic Wars. Each period is broken down into a series of different missions and levels, giving you a steady stream of targets to judge your burgeoning society by before you can advance.
Whatever time period you’re focusing on, infrastructure is key. From the moment you place your Forum at the centre of your city, it becomes a race to house the plebeians, keep them gainfully employed, dig, find or grow material resources, and curry favour with the people. Leave too many unemployed or disgruntled citizens, and you’ll soon find your city beset by thieves, murderers and criminality. So… don’t let that happen?
Once you have the basics prepared, your city’s Prestige Level will increase, opening up new buildings and options for further expansion. This is also a good time to hop into the wider regional map and have your explorers take a gander at the nearest settlements, opening up the possibility of trade and collaboration with them. If you become a reliable trading partner, your relationship with that town will improve, and they may be able to provide you with soldiers and military support in return.
I was immediately impressed by how in-depth and fully featured Citadelum feels. It’s not a cut-back console port or a simplified genre entry, it’s a true city builder, with the gauges, percentages and macro-economics to prove it. It’s an interesting experience playing a game of this type on the TV and in handheld, but it’s been well optimised, with larger text, readable icons, and a tutorial that takes you through all of the most important aspects of the game before it turns you loose.
The Campaign steadily gives you a full understanding of all of the different multi-level resource and building trees, factoring in housing, agriculture, entertainment, combat and religion. For all that Citadelum is a fairly calm, relaxed experience, battles, and the appearance of the occasional unhappy god to smite you, bring a surprising level of chaos that’ll keep you tinkering away for hours on end.
There are six gods to woo with your religious fervour, and you can curry their favour to speed your technological growth or feed your nation, though equally, you can make them upset. Get it wrong, and they’ll appear to smash up your buildings or ruin your crops, setting your city back, and forcing you to rethink how you worship them. It brings a touch of Age of Mythology to Citadelum, and at first, it felt like an odd fit. After you spend more time here, though, it feels utterly authentic to the era, and whatever you might think, it’s certainly a fun addition.
In terms of controls, Citadelum is well optimised for controller, with the shoulder buttons cycling through your different categories, and different buttons opening up sub-categories from there. You build to a grid, and while the controller input is occasionally a little finicky, such as when you’re trying to build a road that does anything other than be straight, everything locks into position, and it’s pretty easy to parse whether playing docked or handheld. It’s just so straightforward to create a huge, but functional, city, and it’s mostly a relaxing, thoughtful experience.
Switching to mouse is a revelation, though. City builders and strategy games just work better with a mouse, and there’s something truly amazing about unclipping the Joy-Con 2 and using them on the sofa next to you. Citadelum feels like a perfect city-building experience in this mode, and I massively enjoyed the mostly laid-back vibes of laying my city out from the comfort of my sofa.
The only annoyance is that you have to manually move between mouse and controller in the options instead of having the switch auto-detected as in Metroid Prime 4, for example. That’s fine when switching to the mouse, but coming back to controller means hopping back into mouse mode. This needs to become an automatic change, and it definitely resulted in some huffing, and indeed, puffing, when I discovered I had to get back up again.
