|
Published
by SEGA
Developed by Tilted Mill Entertainment
Release Date: Out Now
Price: £29.99
I
was a huge fan of the City Building Series developed by
Impressions Games. Games such as Caesar III, Pharaoh and
Zeus still remain some of my most played games and I never
grow tired of them. Times change however and with Impressions
now a distant memory, the City Building Series that we all
knew has gone forever. The key developers from Impressions
formed Tilted Mill and at first glance their first game
might make you think that they’ve created a sequel
to the hugely popular Pharaoh. Indeed Immortal Cities: Children
of the Nile certainly seems to be that until you actually
spend time with the game and then you find that it’s
a very different experience altogether.
Children
of the Nile is a strategy game that encourages focusing
on the people rather than the cold statistics. Previous
City Building games used the people to represent statistics.
Yes they looked like people and right clicking on them bought
out some telling and often humorous comments, but for the
most part they simply walked around to show you which areas
were receiving the services they provided. In Children of
the Nile though the people you see are virtual citizens
that have needs and desires. They have families and characteristics
that make them who they are. It’s kind of like Tropico
(the Caribbean flavoured strategy game from PopTop) in this
respect. You keep the people happy, satisfy their needs
and you will have a population that can achieve things.
Ignore their needs and you aren’t going to achieve
anything. The game includes a Campaign, Scenarios and Learn
to Play tutorials as well as an editor to create your own
scenarios and campaigns.
As
we said in the introduction Children of the Nile is very
different from Pharaoh and past City Building games. The
previous games always felt like a juggling act. In many
ways Children of the Nile is more realistic and more involving.
The core ingredients of the game are bread, bricks and prestige
because if you’re lacking in either of these you’re
going nowhere. Bread is really more than just food in the
game; it’s its currency too. Government workers are
paid in bread and without it you’ll have no services.
Without bricks of course you’ll never have any of
the important government buildings and your society will
never evolve. Without prestige you won’t be able to
hire educated workers who perform important duties such
as priests (who tend the gods, run the hospitals and apothecaries,
educate and perform funerary functions) overseers, scribes
and commanders.
Whilst
you can all probably guess how food and bricks are obtained,
prestige is obtained through building monuments and achievements.
Propaganda allows you to build obelisks and stele to gain
further prestige. Prestige allows you to hire educated workers.
Initially you’ll only have access to one educated
worker. It can’t be stressed enough that this educated
worker must be made a priest who should then be instructed
to educate others in the school. This will enable you to
have a steady supply of graduates who can then fill important
roles as they become available. However to begin with you’ll
only have enough prestige to hire 4 educated workers so
you’ll have to work on earning enough prestige to
be able to hire more.
From
the few paragraphs above you can see for yourself just how
different the game is. Fortunately Tilted Mill has included
three tutorials that make every aspect of the game clear.
These tutorials are invaluable and I found myself revisiting
them from time to time until I was completely comfortable
with how everything in the game works. The game manual isn’t
as comprehensive as it could have been but the thoroughness
of the tutorials and the wealth of text information help
that’s been built into the game more than compensate
for this.
Whilst
the game is very different from Pharaoh some things remain
very similar. Building large monuments such as pyramids
takes a very long time to do and requires lots of preparation.
More often than not materials will have to be imported from
other locations and you’ll have to visit the world
map in order to arrange all this (in a similar way to previous
City Building games). That said though there is a definite
slant towards realism in the game. For instance an Overseer
will have a labour camp built around him and you’ll
be expected to provide a bakery, hospital and other important
facilities for these workers to use in a very similar manner
to how it would have been done for the ancient Egyptians.
The
big difference with Children of the Nile of course (when
compared to those earlier games) is that everything is in
3D. Rather than creating a custom game engine Tilted Mill
decided to use the same one that featured in Empire Earth,
albeit an enhanced version. The Empire Earth engine is a
dated one but Tilted Mill have managed to make the game
look quite good and for the most part I’m happy with
the look of the game, although there are some rough edges
both in the animation of the characters and the look of
the game. Occasionally you’ll see your citizens walk
on the spot as if they are stuck on something. They do manage
to continue moving after a while but it’s still disappointing
to see. You’ll also spot various minor graphical glitches
such as when the floods begin and water begins to cover
the land. This is probably due do the limitations of the
Empire Engine rather than a fault of the developers though.
Children
of the Nile is fine for deaf gamers. There are some omissions
but on the whole there’s nothing that’s going
to cause any problems. When you’re zoomed in on your
citizens they’ll occasionally make some comments that
aren’t shown in text and when your prestige rises,
the voice that informs you of this isn’t subtitled
(although a dialogue box appears that tells you more educated
workers are interested in working for you). These omissions
are not a major concern though as all information can be
gained from the interface. In fact Children of the Nile
is a very visually informative game in that it uses a lot
of icons to relay information and even the look of the buildings
and people provide you with information on how well you’re
doing in the game. The tutorials are fully subtitled and
you can even recall the previous messages that have been
issued by pressing the ‘M’ key or by clicking
the message log button. All mission objectives are shown
in text and can be recalled at any time. The game claims
to have a free strategy guide but it’s really just
a collection of QuickTime movies that explain several areas
of the game. These aren’t subtitled though but to
be perfectly honest it’s no great loss.
When
I first began playing Children of the Nile my initial reaction
was that it was too far away from the previous City Building
games and I felt disappointed by this. This disappointment
soon disappeared though as I progressed through the tutorials
because it became obvious that what Tilted Mill had created
with Children of the Nile was a deeper richer game play
experience that wasn’t intended to be anything like
those previous games. Somehow it feels more natural and
less hectic. Time and again I loaded the game to only play
for 10 minutes to look at something in particular and ended
up playing for a few hours. It’s a relaxing experience
and doesn’t go out of its way to be too punishing
if you make a mess of things. Believe me when I say it’s
quite easy to lose whole evenings playing Children of the
Nile, which is always a sign you’re playing a quality
game.
Overall
Game Rating: 9.0/10
It's been a long time since we had a great City Building
strategy game and many thought the genre had done all that
was possible. Tilted Mill have proved a lot of people wrong
though with Children of the Nile as they've shown that there
are many innovations still to be made.
Deaf
Gamers Classification:
(Click
the letter or here
for details)
There are a couple of omissions
but for the most part deaf gamers will have a great time
with Children of the Nile.
A
demo can be found on the official website. Click here for
details.
|
