Gone are the days when match 3 puzzles just involved just flipping the identical tiles into a straight line in order to score. Today, match 3 category has become very vast with thousands of games in it, leading it to become a separate sub-genre. These games may come with a variety of interface and animation effects along with a number of themes like mystery solving or RPG. Cradle of Rome v.2.0 is a freeware match 3 game where you as an emperor, solve a large set of challenging puzzles and experience the entire recreation of the ancient empire of Rome consisting of villages and woods.

Cradle of Rome v.2.0 consists of over 100 rounds of match 3 puzzles and the player solves them and gain resources like wood and grain to create and enhanced his empire as the prime duty of an able Emperor. The development of empire is a continuous process and the player spends all the resources to create taverns, buildings and farms in his empire. The aim of the player in the game is to arrange matches on blue tiles and eliminating them from the puzzle maze. There are various power-ups in the game such as hammer to destroy the tiles and all the levels are times where the player has to complete the level before the symbolic vessel of water on the bottom right hand corner of the screen empties out. In the entire game, you have five epochs through which you pass to convert your territory from a herd of villages to metropolis.

To sum up, Cradle of Rome v.2.0 is not much different from other match 3 games on the game-play part but comes with nice graphics and animation effects and some RPG element, leading it to score three and a half rating points on the scale of five.