"The Nile awaits."

Let me start by saying, I have played all the games by this company, and am a huge fan of the city and empire building genres. I can sum this game up easily. This is 1503, except set in the times of the Egyptian empire. Personally, I liked this game. You delegate tasks to subjects by placing buildings, the subjects raise themselves out of being simple vagrants to being workers, overseers, or nobles. Think Stronghold meets 1503. You supply the housing and stores, they do the rest. Well, here is the review.

Graphics: Some minor silly things aside (my favorite is how peasants walk underwater after the Nile floods.) the graphics are really good. You can see your subjects making pots, baking bread, dancing the Funky Pharoh, and pretty much every other task the game says they are doing. Alot of little details are thrown in for good measure, such as individual bricks on houses, artwork, and animals moving along in the fauna. 8/10

Sound: Your subjects comment on your rule, children laugh while they play, and the music sounds like it belongs. But, all of that gets a little old after awhile. 7/10

Gameplay: The interface is easily usable, you can create buildings on the fly without having to go through twenty separate menus, and the game lets you know how well you are doing with a simple and easily read "complaints" bar. I have a pretty decent computer, and I have yet to have any problems, even with many subjects on the screen at once. A feature I have to comment on, however, is the army use. You can have a standing army of considerable size. But using the army is clunky, hard, and does not help much. You do not see the battle, rather, you get told if your army was victorious, or beaten. It feels like it was thrown in as an afterthought. Lastly, the games big resource, prestige, is hard to follow. It deteriorates over time, and is implemented in a strange way. You cannot hire many people if your prestige is to low. To gain it, you need monuments, followers, and you must supply your citizens with all their needs. Thing is, to get religion up, you need several priests. Priests take a large portion of prestige to maintain. Combine this with the large amount of deities to worship, and how subjects want to worship several of them.This makes keeping religion satisfied a hard goal to achieve.9/10

On the whole, a great game. Just some minor issues that could easily be cleaned up with a patch or two. If you are a fan of the genre, buy this game. If you are a fan of city sims, buy this game after some consideration. And if you are looking for an RTS, go play some Command and Conquer.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 12/06/04