Reviewed: February 1, 2003
Reviewed by: Mat Houghton and Dave Larson

Publisher
Sierra Entertainment

Developer
Impressions Games

Released: : September 10, 2002
Genre: Strategy
Players: 16
ESRB: Everyone

7
6
6
7
6.8

System Requirements:

That is essentially the game in a nutshell. However, like Szechwan cooking the main ingredients aren’t too exciting -- it’s the little spices that you have to watch out for. You know, those little red peppers? They’re hot. This game is similar; you have to be careful what you’re sinking your teeth into. Firstly, you’re not the only city in China during the time period of the game, which did I neglect to mention covered about 3,111 years of Chinese history? So the first little monkey in the works is that you have to establish relations, hopefully good, with these other cities, begin trade, form alliances, send out spies, etc. The alternative to this is crushing your rivals beneath your ironclad heel, or working frantically to prevent them from doing so to you. Don’t get too excited though, because you’re not going to get to see the massive rows of enemy soldiers impaled by your conquering troops.

The second is you have to be aware of religion, and for those atheists out there, yes, you do have to include it in your plan. Your housing cannot improve without at the least access to an ancestral temple, and then the higher levels need Buddhist or Taoist access. The real kicker is the sacrificing (no, not human—the virgins are safe). Once a month you can pay homage to ancestral, Buddhist, Taoist, or Confucian heroes. If you do, they become pleased with your efforts and if you honor them enough they will appear in your city, which provides you with benefits such as blessing buildings, decreasing building costs, satisfying requests from other cities, and capturing animals for your menagerie. If you ignore these heroes, umm… do you like living above water? I do. Keep the ancestors happy and they’ll keep you happy. Don’t, and the alternative doesn’t bear thinking about. I pray the Lord Vader will not alter his deal any further.

The final bit of flavor is the addition of feng shui to your building plans. Basically feng shui is the notion that things should be arranged in a certain order. Proper placement of buildings brings peace and harmoniousness. This means that there is good building placement and not so good placement. I’m not sure what rules they have applied to figure out what constitutes good or bad placement for different buildings, but it’s obvious. Green building “footprints” are good, yellow are bad. The placement of buildings effects the people’s perception of you (the more they like you the less unrest in the city), and also on whether or not the buildings advance easily or not.

Here are some more Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom features:

• 7 long single player campaigns.
• Online play with up to eight players.
• Over 20 resources and products to trade and generate income.
• Individual walkers that keep your city running and in shape.
• New combat controls to keep back the barbarians.

Campaign mode has a very fresh approach, from the tutorial to the actual missions there’s a lot of game play. The tutorial particularly is very well put together. Instead of the usual step by step walkthrough, you’re given a lengthy bit of text that outlines what your goals are and then you’re left to your own devices to do it. They basically set things up so you have to do things as they’ve outlined, but even so there is a lot of leeway. Also, you can open and close the text box at will so you don’t have to read it all once and remember. You can move things along at your pace rather than whatever the programmers set things at, which is good, because I don’t know about you, but I hate having to sit through a bunch of stuff that I already know from other games just to learn the unique controls for this game.

The tutorials are also very well laid out and get you used to the game in very good chunks. They start you out with population and agriculture, move onto industry and trade, and finally advance to government and military. The sequences and progression are excellent. A word to the wise however, many of the missions build off of one another, so be wary of over-building as you may get yourself into a corner that you can only get out of by starting over.

Tutorial aside, the campaign missions work similarly with objectives ranging from achieving certain population levels, to having a hero in your city for so many months, or acquiring trading partners or cementing alliances. Those aren’t really the important things though. What is important in a game like this is mechanics. This is the really complicated part because everything is interconnected. We’ll lay it out from the beginning because I hear that’s a very good place to start.

You start with a road and that’s about it. Almost every building needs road access, and having good infrastructure will be good for later on. Your need people to work for you so you can forage or grow food, produce goods such as ceramics, silk, or carved jade. These in turn are used for trade and to upgrade your housing. This last is the single most important element of the game. You can only have so much space for housing so you want to upgrade your housing, which will allow more people to live in each house. More people mean more workers, which means more products, which… you get the idea. There are a few details I’ve left out. For instance, you have to get the food you grow to your people, and also make sure that none of your buildings collapse or burn down, and you have to make sure that houses get enough water, medical attention, and religious coverage. Suffice it to say this is all interrelated, and if you screw one thing up then you have a problem that snowballs out of control quickly.

That’s my biggest complaint about the interface. They’re usually pretty good about giving you warnings about hygiene deteriorating, but there are a few very important things they don’t tell you about, such as merchants not being able to purchase goods because the gate you put up prevents them from reaching the market, and other oddities. Overall though the interface is excellent, it’s much easier than Chinese checkers at any rate, or shogi (Chinese chess), and any problems you encounter are usually from bad planning. In other words, no it’s not a good idea to build the mill or the clay pits in the middle of your residential area, and putting your warehouses far away from your production facilities is only going to slow things down, and for heaven sakes keep those stormtroopers out of the ale house or they’ll never be able to shoot straight.

The buildings are certainly up to par; the houses are cool, but the other buildings, most notably the towers and religious buildings, are sweet. Emperor also has a nice selection of gardens, paths and walls; however, I found the ornamentation in the game lacking. Admittedly, the details are mostly focused on the practical elements that drive the infrastructure of your cities. For example, the silk and fish commodities are cool looking; however, the statues are lacking, and I felt that there should have been more color to make these cities scintillate.

That being said, I want to give some kudos for the graphics team because everything is easy to discern; there was no confusion running the game, which is really the most important thing in a city builder. But, in the manner of a dynastic emperor, I will take with one hand while I give with the other. Kudos for your icons, and a heckle for your still artwork. It’s not just bad, it’s terrible. The cartoon people are straight out of “C” comics. You know, the ones that you can’t even find in a comic book store because they’re so bad. You can only find them at the corner gas station because they don’t know any better.

The speech in this game is hard to make out. I don’t think it’s really that garbled, but they’re pretty soft, even with the audio controls manipulated. However, the creators did put a lot of time into having a line for each walker character, and the heroes’ voices are nicely hollow and sepulchral.

As opposed to Sim City, where money drives all, in Emperor you need to worry about food, raw materials, finished products, safety, and distribution. This level of complexity is certainly worth the time to experience. So grab your abaci and weapons, your advisors and your armies, and lead your city to glorify the Emperor!