Romans in my Carpet!

I'm not sure quite where Witching Hour got the idea to set its next strategy title in a microscopic world where Roman dust mites battle it out against Barbarian beetles, but I'm willing to bet it involved a dark room and a steady diet of B-movies and powerful hallucinogens.

If I'm correct, that would also explain some of the bizarre design decisions that have gone into this game, the oddest of which has to be the requirement to sign up for an account, and stay online, every time and all the time you want to play, even if you were just planning on spending some time with the single-player campaign.

That said, it's a pretty short campaign and weak artificial intelligence means it doesn't have a whole lot of replay value.

It's one of those rare games that sees you issuing orders to all of your units, waiting for your opponent to do the same, and then watching the mayhem that results from your presumptions about what the other player was going to do.

Games of this nature, like Frozen Synapse, tend to work better multi-player and everything about Romans in My Carpet screams that this was where the development focus lay.

So why, after having provided a perfectly easy and delightful multi-player match-up system, does it partially shoot itself in the foot by demanding play is pretty much real time?

Matches aren't more than ten or 20 minutes long, but games sort of run asynchronously - you've got a two-hour window to make your first move, but fail to do so and the tyrannical timer deletes your game, no questions asked.

It's a bit of a shame, really, because Romans in my Carpet is otherwise quite a fun little light strategy game with a goofy streak a mile wide. It's got a lot in common with developer Witching Hour's previous releases, Ravenmark and Ravenmark: Mercenaries, although it's a much simpler, more streamlined game.

The pre-issued orders obviously leave an awful lot to chance, but there's a basic rock, paper, scissors type framework where each of the four basic unit types is inferior to one other, and superior to one other.

That simple framework gives the game a bit of tactical meat, fleshed out by the fact that experienced players can use it to try and predict their opponents' moves.

There are some additional options provided by the fact that each unit has a special ability, and there are some silly support units like dung Catapults and healing Droods to further enrich the mix. Although the Romites and Breetles share the same basic unit types, the sides play significantly differently because their support and special abilities are wildly different.

Sometimes, all that detail dovetails nicely with the confusion engendered by issuing orders without a clue what the other side is planning, but sometimes the arbitrary nature of events leaves you feeling frustrated. Getting that balance right between chaos and control is a tough call in most strategy games, but Romans in my Carpet is just ever so slightly off the centre.

That feeling of disorganisation is deepened by the fact that the game fails to properly introduce everything to you during the tutorial. It's not obvious, for instance, that units have special abilities, let alone what they might be.

It only takes a tiny amount of exploration to figure things out, and to clear up any doubt there's an entertaining codex with full details for every unit, together with some amusingly tongue-in-cheek fluff. But it just adds to the impression that while the disparate parts of the game work fine, it just doesn't quite all tie neatly together.

If a future update were to either beef up the single-player experience or expand the multi-player one so that it wasn't quite so hard on anyone who perhaps wants to be able to go to bed in the middle of a late-night battle and pick it up again the next day, Romans in my Carpet could become a significant player in the mobile strategy market.

As it stands, it's not a lot more than a fun diversion. But the price reflects that, so if the theme appeals, it's probably worth a punt.