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"Pharoah/Cleopatra" by Sierra is better

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 93 / 104
Date: November 14, 2004
Author: Amazon User

"Immortal Cities" is designed by Chris Beatrice, who also designed "Pharoah/Cleopatra". This game does have stunning 3D graphics. The animations are nice. The interface is a little less than perfect. But the biggest problem, in my opinion, is gameplay speed: even on the fast speed, gameplay is slow. I sat around twidling my thumbs a lot while waiting for enough stored food or stored bricks (or other resources) so that some project or building could begin. I have a 2GHz machine, and turned down the graphics quality etc, but the game is not an action-packed game. "Pharoah/Cleopatra" had more ability to keep my interest despite the more cartoony graphics. The manual gives a good introduction to the game, and the in-game help is great.

You can trade resources in this game, but each trade partner city only offers one resource, unlike "Pharoah/Cleopatra" where multiple trade items were available in each city. There are also only 5 games to the campaign instead of the dozens of campaign levels in "Pharoah/Cleopatra". The characters do have lots of silly little lines as they talk to each other, but that gets old pretty quick and you'll turn them off. I wouldn't compare this game to "The Sims" at all .. you have no control over specifically what each person says or does. The best you can do is toggle a specialty. Yes there are families, but the wife basically does the shopping, the kid gathers resources, and the father creates the resources. In the end, this is still a "walker" kind of game .. the priest walks from his home to go shopping, then goes to the temple or hospital to perform his services, etc...essentially the same as "Pharaoh/Cleopatra". The AI routines for the little people are nice, which is good because you'll be spending a lot of time watching the people while you wait for other things to happen. You do a lot of watching, which makes the game less exciting.

Minimum System specs: Pentium 3 - 800MHz or higher. Windows 98/2000/ME/XP. 128MB RAM. 1.1Gigabytes uncompressed harddrive space. DirectX 9.0b compatible video card with 32MB memory and compatible sound card with 16bit sound.

Recommended specs: Pentium 4 - 2.0GHz processor. 512MB RAM. 64MB video card with full DirectX9.0 support.

The game is rated "E" for Mild Violence. The violence comes from two sources: fighting and killing the wild animals that attack, and fighting and killing the human raiders or enemies.

Overall, this game might be interesting to pre-teens or those who never played "Pharoah/Cleopatra". Despite the 3D graphics, I would recommend that you not waste your money on this game ... instead go get a copy of "Pharoah" by Sierra (ASIN B00002CF9G).

Good for youngsters, but too slow for most

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 47 / 48
Date: January 07, 2005
Author: Amazon User

In the style of the many city-building games that came before it, Children of the Nile lets you create homes, shops and estates in classic Egypt.

First, I am a huge fan of city building games in general. I have spent countless hours laying out roads, adding in plazas, watching with glee as the homes upgraded and the people became more and more happy.

I do have to say that the graphics in this game are pretty impressive. You can zoom out to an overview level to watch your city's progress, or zoom in to such a level that you can see the individual flowers. Each home, person and land formation is clear and identifiable.

However, the gameplay itself is extremely slow. I have very high end systems here so it's not that my system was "slow". It's just that the gameplay *is* slow. You request something, and then sit around for quite a while waiting for it to happen.

Adding to the sense of time going slowly is the game clock. It isn't even ticking by day after day. It ticks by *minute by minute* which makes little sense for a game that spans years. You have three seasons, and a certain number of days per season. The minutes going by make it seem sim-like, but of course the actual timeline doesn't quite make sense.

As far as the AI goes, this game goes for the family approach. Each household has a male, female and child. The male tends to do whatever the "job" of the household is (farming, making bricks, etc). The woman has to go out from shop to shop, buying household necessities. In some homes she also has to do the crafts. The child either helps with work, or runs off to school.

The game is pretty straightforward in its chain of commerce. You put the brick maker near the clay. You put the brick layer partway between the brick maker and where the brick homes will be built. You build shops nearby so the wives don't have to go far to shop.

I realize that the game has to be slow for beginners, but even the fastest speed still trudges along at a crawl. If you really set it on the slowest setting, you could go eat lunch before anything began to happen! Zooming in and out of every part of your town only keeps you occupied for so long.

Recommended for younger players who are fine with a very slow pace, but for most players this is just going to be too tedious. Small maps, few campaigns, and long, long waits between action.

More involved economy, game play, and prestige

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 39 / 40
Date: January 09, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Includes: Campaign with 15 scenarios, several free play “sand box” scenarios, and 3 stand alone (combat heavy) scenarios “Sheshonq’s Redemption”, “The Hyksos Pharaoh” and “Son of Ra”. Also includes a seriously complex editor that can even take geophysical terrain maps (they’re free on the internet) and use them for your scenarios. There is an active community already making new scenarios that you can download over the internet for free.

102 items in your economy that your people can harvest, make and sell. Active night and day cycle as well as the seasons effect the landscape. Different social classes. The most difficult to obtain workers are educated elites (ie people who can read and write, enabling them to work at a distance without supervision), but the most productive.

Very complex World Map. The Hard scenarios trade multiple items per city but if you play only the easy scenarios you’ll only see one item per trade partner.

After you get the farming and goods economy going in your city you start to actively build monuments: Pyramids, Mastabas, Obelisks, Stellas and many statues (Of course Sphinxes. I like the Bast statues best myself) that increase your prestige. For the easy scenarios you can ignore building monuments and still win… but your city will then be boring and you’ll twiddle your thumbs a lot with nothing to do, and never achieve any prestige as a Pharaoh.

You want to build pyraminds and other monuments to make yourself famous, but also because they just look great placed in your city. The graphics at ground level are just gorgeous, and taking a screenshot for the web is just hitting cntl-F9 at any time. There are many, many gorgeous pictures of the Moon rising over Pyramids or the sun setting in a red sky behind tall Obelisks (think building multiple Washington Monuments in a line) on the Tilted Mill web site from players. Your Nobles also want tombs for their eternal rest, so building a creepy sprawling necropolis is part of what keeps your people happy. Egypt without tombs isn’t Egypt.

The battle scenarios are pretty clearly marked, but this is no twitch game requiring a 12 year old’s reflexes. Equipping, training and supporting an army is significantly more expensive than just raising a village of farmers happy to own bed mats. And the new editor allows realistic reasons why you’d want to raise an army: Their success or failure actually changes the world economy. Enemies build forts, raid cities, close trade routes to important goods like gold and turquoise mines. But combat is optional (Absent really form the Easy scenarios) and often the storylines also allow another way to succeed (in “Pi-Ramses” a timely bribe to an enemy army captain keeps you from having to fight) Also the lockstep one battle one city limitations of Pharaoh are gone. Winning a battle can set multiple triggers at once –defeating an enemy can mean a whole new frontier of cities to explore opening up, multiple new trade partners suddenly appearing, or sometimes just multiple new sections of the map appearing that need to be explored by your Envoys. The easy scenario Djedu is silly but still a likeable favorite –your build a fleet of ships in Lebanon to sail out west to the Atlantic, circumnavigate Africa, and eventually return by the Red Sea, At each stop they make they discover new trading partners who then join your economy.

The free demo is helpful for getting used to the yummy 3D view and how to navigate through the game, but it suffers (as all tutorials do) from leading you by the nose in a very business like way of teaching you how to use the controls. The actual game is fun. The demo… is about teaching you how to play the game, and not 10% as fun as the full game.

surprisingly cool

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 20 / 20
Date: November 15, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Picked this up over the weekend after gamestop ran out of RCT3. I have to admit that I've been surprised by what I first thought was just going to be simcity egypt. After going through the tutorials (good luck if you don't), it's easy enough to get a sizeable city going, but building pyramids requires planning and strategy, which I've found to be challenging and fun.
The depth of gameplay here is really refreshing. Although it can take a while to see results with some of your larger projects, I spend most of my time zooming through the city and figuring out what's happening on the street level--like a huge ant farm. I didn't play Pharoah, but I'm already pretty deep into this one. Graphics are great--not Unreal3 or anything--but perfect for this style of game.

City Builder: The Next Generation!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 23 / 25
Date: November 07, 2004
Author: Amazon User

There's a kind of game called "city builders" that started with Sim-City years ago, made a big jump in something called Caesar III, and continued on through Zeus and Emperor. You build... well, CITIES... but it's fun and they're historical in cool time periods etc.

Children of the Nile is the inheritor of this tradition but it's made a big jump. It's 3 dimensional, people-oriented, thought-provoking, scenic, engaging, and FUN. Think "Sims3 meets Pharaoh" and you're sort of in the ball park.

If you've never played a city-builder, try this one. If you've played city-builders and have been looking for something new and next-generation, try this one.

Strangely, it seems to unify adults and kids in its fascination and interest. Am currently tussling with my daughter (11) over playing taking turns :-). Make no mistake, it's fun enough for kids and teens but sophisticated (and fun) enough for demanding adults.

A great game!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 18 / 18
Date: November 11, 2004
Author: Amazon User

If you liked the old impression city builders you will love this one too! Amazing graphics of your city now fully in 3D so you can walk with your people on a leisure stroll or look at them while they do every days work. You can here them talk as there are more than a thousand lines in the game!

You can do so many great things like building pyramids with a totally new infrastructure system that doesn't need roads. In the older games you only had the walkers to upkeep the infrastructure but now you got famalies with three people in each and a lot of them and all these people will struggel every day for food and goods they need.

At first this gameplay seems a bit strange but if you play it a bit you will easy attach and will see that it is very interesting to layout a city that doen't depend on roads like in the old games but on a more flutend structure this time.

You can build fantastic monuments and wage war aggainst opponents on the world map and by this achieve great your place in egyptian history!

I do very like this game and play it every day as it offers me every time something new.

3D isn't always better

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 15 / 15
Date: June 25, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This game is supposed to be the "improved" version of Pharaoah, which was a terriffic game IMHO, but was a flat, two dimensional plane game. I hate how they're taking these games (like Roller Coaster Tycoon) and making them three dimensional when the three dimensionality only makes it more difficult to maneuver across the terrain.
For this game, I couldn't play it that long because the game designers went for realism over function in creating the buildings with the result that every building looks the same, so you forget what is what, not to mention that everything looks bland overall.

Great concept - poor execution

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 11 / 11
Date: May 14, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Children of the Nile is a completely new genre of citybuilder game where each 'character' is controlled by an AI and for this alone the developers deserve much credit. The premise holds much promise, unfortunately that promise is unrealized in this game.

Other reviews have mentioned the high system requirements and this will be an issue if your system is not at the higher end of the recommendations.

The citybuilding aspect of the game itself is very nice and well conceived. The economy is well thought out and sufficiently intricate and can be interesting and fun. The towns that can be built offer great variety due to terrain and resource availability differences among the scenarios. Growth of the city, however, eventually depends on interaction with the rest of the world...

Where the game fails in my opinion is on what they call the 'World Level'. This is where all interaction with the rest of the world occurs. It seems to be an afterthought tacked on rather than something that was planned from the inception. Every 'World Level' interaction requires the player to save up certain amounts of specified goods to send out expeditions to these sites. Unhappily, the same sites appear in scenario after scenario (only the amounts of goods required to explore them ever seems to change). Saving up these goods can often be difficult and time consuming with little else to occupy the player while you wait. This is what for me makes the game tedious and dull. It also negatively impacts replayability as so many scenarios seem so similar already that once all have been played there seemed little interest to me in playing them again (although I did in order to be fair). There is no diplomacy available and trade is far too limited with the same goods available from the same places over and over.

The bottom line is that in this game you spend a lot of time watching and little time doing and as a result the game does not engage my attention. The tutorials and manual, while barely adequate, do not really give a new player sufficient information to really play the game. In fact, some suggestions and recommendations made there do not work well at all in practice leading me to believe that the game does not in all respects play as conceived by the developers.

One reviewer has mentioned that there is a scenario editor whereby fans can create scenarios adding to those limited ones that come prepackaged with the game. A quick look at the game's website reveals that most of these fan-created scenarios have been developed by expert players whose primary focus seems to be making a difficult, long, and often boring game even more so. The editor itself is dauntingly difficult to use and I wouldn't expect 'average' players wishing to develop scenarios just for fun to be persistent enough to bother.

I would guess that most citybuilder fans already have this game. If you are a new player wanting to try your hand at citybuilders, I would recommend trying any of the old Impressions games - Pharaoh, Cleopatra, Zeus, and Poseidon - all of which are easier to figure out and more entertaining to play.

Enjoyable and stimulating!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 11 / 13
Date: February 04, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I've played numerous simulation and strategy games, but none have impressed me as much as 'Children of the Nile'. The graphics is in 3D with excellent detail and you have complete control over the camera views. Zoom down and watch your 'children' move from place to place carrying wares, soldiers running to the training grounds or watching the 'children' dance in the streets.

I had a very hard time walking away from the game once I got started and the more I played, the more experienced I became at managing the senarios.

There are a few minor flaws, such as clipping, or some annoying 'stuck' children, but the technical support has been awesome! They were very receptive to the customer and quickly provided fixes after the game was released.

If you loved Pharaoh and Cleopatra, you'll LOVE this game.

Lousy half-baked 3D city-builder. "Pharaoh"/"Cleopatra" much MUCH better

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 11 / 14
Date: October 24, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Considering that this was perported to be like Pharaoh, only in 3D (and I had liked Pharaoh very much) I tried this one out

The only needing 1 CD for a 3D game in this day and age should have turned me off of the idea (Pharaoh only needed 1 CD too) but instead I pushed ahead with it.

In NO WAY does this resemble any of the famous predecessor games, Caesar III or Pharaoh or Zeus-Master of Olympus.

For one part, the user interface is abysmally clunky, with building options opening up from the side, crowding up much of the screen, and needing to be clicked AGAIN in order to close it up. Building placement is awkward, and roads are seemingly useless, as it doesn't matter where you place buildings, because people will reach them regardless.

Next, immigration. Rather than simply building housing for your people, you have to build INDIVIDUAL buildings, which house only one working man, his wife and single child. Also, you have to build the houses for shopkeepers, as they apparently work out of the home, and have to constantly build new ones to add variety to every area of your city.

All other buildings save these require bricks to be built, so you must build a brickmaker AND a bricklayer (both act as houses and work areas) and the game itself even admits that bricklayers are lazy and won't deliver bricks anywhere unless it's close by! Thus, you have to build brickmakers and layers almost everywhere.

All in all, everything else is a mess involving just building buildings, with production constantly stalled by lazy bricklayers, and very difficult to understand controls (unlike Pharaoh and the others, there is no advisors page which helps guide you around the constructing of a functioning city rather than a mere village. The large building size also means that cities will be very small and unimpressive (my tutorial city in "Pharaoh" was over 2000 citizens large to function well, whereas my tutorial city in "Children of the Nile" had less than fifty!)

Watching the little people walk around is utterly pointless and boring

Made even worse is that the more advanced buildings (such as temples and the like) require educated priests trained at a school, and just getting a single priest to come to the city to work at the school is a hassle! Even then, they have insanely important tasks to perform rather than teach, such as dealing with medicine and hospitals, courting the Gods, etc!

All in all, a very terrible, uninvolving, uninteresting game. Total failure

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