Reviewed: December 20, 2004
Reviewed by: Mike Colgan

Publisher
Myelin Media

Developer
Tilted Mill Entertainment

Released: : November 9, 2004
Genre: Strategy
Players: 6
ESRB: Everyone

9
7
6
7
7.3

System Requirements:

Although there are some minor flaws in its execution, Children of the Nile shines as a detailed, engrossing, and (most importantly) fun sim that challenges you not only to build a magnificent city, but also a magnificent society. Chris Beatrice, the designer of Pharaoh, builds his new game around people, not statistics, and the results are evolutionary for the genre.

You direct not only a society of statistics, but a society of people. In previous games of the genre, people were just numbers. You had a certain number of people living in a certain type of house (and the houses got nicer and held more people as the value went up), and a certain number of manufacturers employing a certain number of people. Animated humans would appear on the roads of your city, but they merely represented the flow of goods and services. Infrastructure was everything.

Now, the virtual people you rule are “real.” They have families, jobs, needs, aspirations, and daily routines. Each person in society fulfills tasks that support his or her daily life; they gather food, go shopping, get educated, go to work, worship, seek medical attention, party and complain. You can even follow them around on their daily routines.

The most noticeable effect of this feature is that you actually start to care about meeting the needs of your own subjects. Your subjects even have names. If you close down a hospital, it doesn’t just cause a 3% decrease in overall approval rating in the city; it actually upsets individual families and shortens their lifespans. If a certain household of nobles is getting taxed too much, they will actually leave town and weaken your ability to feed your people.

These real people propel a real economy. Farmers grow food for the Pharaoh and the nobles; some of this food gets taxed and put into government coffers to pay government workers. Citizens eat some of their food, and the rest they use to barter with merchants for goods. You can actually watch as a person (usually the woman of the household) takes food down to the market, negotiates, and exchanges an agreed-upon amount of food for pottery, linens, furniture, etc.

The government can obtain more money by sending workers to mine precious minerals and trading traveling merchants for specialty materials not available in Egypt. Once the government obtains exotic materials, they can sell them to luxury merchants who will make nicer items, which fetch a higher price from the wealthy.

The individual humans in Children of the Nile are fairly “intelligent” for the purposes of the game. They will only move into town from the villages if there are open positions waiting for them. They don’t need roads in order to get from point A to point B (although they prefer them). If their food needs are not met with quality vegetables and bread, they will forage pomegranates and dates to feed themselves.

However, there are times where it seems that your Egyptians are too distracted for their own good. Sometimes, while watching an Egyptian who has needed new pottery for days, you will notice the wife leaving the house with bread, perfectly intent on buying some pottery, but right before she gets to the potters’ shop, she’ll change her mind and go home. These problems (probably bugs) are few and far between, but it is frustrating to watch them happen.

One particularly annoying error caused me to restart from an earlier saved game. I noticed that my Pharaoh’s household was extremely unhappy, and upon investigation I found that there were no royal princesses in the household. The royal household is ALWAYS supposed to have at least one princess, who handles all the shopping and makes sure that the Pharaoh has a well-appointed palace to return to. Unfortunately, in the absence of a princess, no one was available to buy goods for the house, so that while the nobles lived in luxury, the Pharaoh lived like a pauper. Since no Pharaoh can be without his creature comforts, and there was no way to return the royal household to matrimonial bliss, I was forced to reset the game.

International affairs are handled well within the game. Envoys can be sent to explore new lands in the region, or to establish colonies for trade or mining. Occasionally you will have to deal with hostile forces, and these hostile forces are displayed on the map. Raiders may interfere with your trade, for instance, and coming for occasional raids of the outer parts of your city. In order to end the disruption, you must raise an army within your capital and send it on an expedition on the world map. Clicking on the raider camps will show the bare minimum army required to attack, and if you decide to send your army, it will indicate to you what your chances of victory are. There is no need to resort to a gimmicky, half-thought-out battle system – the battles are managed automatically by field commanders. Conquest of foreign cities is handled in much the same way.

The most enjoyable element of this game is turning your good city into a grand city. There are gods to be honored and Pharaohs to be buried, and Children of the Nile lets you do so in style. It will take all of your managerial and commercial prowess to obtain the massive amounts of limestone, granite, basalt, and bricks required to make your city the envy of all. Projects range from small sphinxes and obelisks that can be completed in a year to massive (and I do mean MASSIVE) pyramids, which will take hundreds of workers and several decades to complete.

You will earn prestige points for all the mighty works you as Pharaoh have accomplished, including architecture and conquest, but in order to achieve great fame abroad, you must have a solid city at home. Children of the Nile is definitely one of those rare but precious games which has kept me up until 5 in the morning, wanting to play “just a little bit more,” and making me lose all track of time.

Once you’ve really got your city running smoothly, the game looks incredible on a grand scale. You can build pyramids, which take up massive areas of land, and when completed, make a great addition to your ancient skyline. With a click-and-drag of the mouse, you can move the camera down and out for a panoramic view of your city, and a button in the main interface allows you to take great-looking screenshots.

The interface for Children of the Nile is clean, uncluttered, and easy-to-use. Although the hieroglyphic-style icons may be a bit unintuitive without an introduction, an excellent tutorial shows you where to find all the controls you need to run your kingdom.

There are a few problems with the graphics though, which can be distracting from an otherwise solid-looking game. There are definite periods of slow down, where the frame rate slows to a crawl. Also, there are issues with the water effects of the Nile, which make the flooding look not quite right. When the Nile is such a central part of the game, it helps if it looks good. Also, certain transparency effects don’t quite work, including the windows which show family members.

Occasionally subjects will voice their current sentiments about life in Egypt; you can zoom in to try to catch part of the comment by zooming in on the person with the speech hieroglyphic above his or her head, but usually the comments contain no real useful information. Either the citizen is saying that life has been good, or he or she is complaining about the city in general. Also, the comments tend to be silly, with people putting on terrible accents which range from generic Middle Eastern to Apu from The Simpsons. Tilted Mill could have helped by making the comments more helpful or leaving them out altogether.