Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile

Sam looks at this Pharoahtastic city builder...

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Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile is the eighth in a long line of god-games. Developed by many of the members of the now defunct Impressions, responsible for such classics as Caesar III and Zeus, 'new' company Tilted Mill Entertainment has taken the very tried and tested gameplay of the previous city sims and given it a good shakedown and a lick of that special three dimensional paint which is apparently compulsory for the last bastion of the 2D sprite, the strategy game. Ostensibly a new start, Immortal Cities is in reality a steady continuation of previous games in the series but with the largest number of noticeable changes since the sub-genre was first born back in 1993.

The most obvious alteration in Immortal Cities is the move to a full 3D engine. And this engine is no locked-orientation cop out, as featured in many of the strategy games that have burrowed through to the third dimension. The camera can be spun and rotated to the player's complete contention. You can swing it to view the world from a top-down perspective or dive it down to look up appreciatively at the glorious monuments that you have constructed. The zoom levels are also commendably generous and overall control of the camera is handled with aplomb. The only thing to suffer in the transition is the level of detail that can be applied to your growing cities and its citizens. Where previous games were resplendent in the myriad of little flourishes and touches that brought the gameworld to life, the 3D engine is unable to emulate this homey feeling with any degree of success. Already some of the charm that so characterised earlier games has been lost in the relentless march towards 'progress'. Don't get me wrong, the engine is very commendable and runs with a slickness that doesn't betray the heavy calculating going on behind the scenes, but it left this particular gamer feeling a little colder than he should have been in at the edges of the Sahara Desert.

To compliment this new engine there's a revamped interface. This is marvellously designed, giving plenty of power to the player without resorting to the myriad of buttons and separate windows that steadily began to plague the earlier games. The entire interface can be hidden from view, so Pharaohs can wander an unobstructed eye over their growing domain. Apart form the world map there's only one screen in Immortal Cities. All the information that previously would have required its own page has been relegated to toolbars along the bottom of the screen. While this condensing of data means that there is marginally less information than in the past, the slipstreaming of almost all the actions needed to run a kingdom into one place outweighs the loss. The interface works with the player and is responsible for keeping tempers at a cool level when the action on the screen begins to hot up.

There are a couple of other points I'd quickly like to mention. The copy of the game I received came with an extra CD full of behind the scenes fluff (including the game trailer!) and far more useful strategy guides, including a number of video walkthroughs with commentary by the development team themselves. It's nice to not be fleeced for an extra fifteen notes or so just so you can understand anything beyond the basics of the game's inner workings. We used to call these strategy guides manuals back in the day. How things have changed, so full credit to Tilted Mill and Sega for bucking an odious trend. Also, and most conveniently, the game continues to run whilst minimized, so you can do something less boring than watch your little wards spend aeons building the larger monuments. A considerate touch.

The biggest other change is in the economic model. Where in previous games you were in direct control of every aspect of production, provision and wealth generation, here you are only in direct control of the civic realm. Your main areas of influence are in placing civic structures like temples and schools and in overseeing the construction of the impressive array of monuments and manipulating the tax levels. While you still place artisan's buildings and houses, the activities that go on within those buildings are independently determined by the families that reside in them. This greatly reduces micromanagement, but being a fan of micromanagement, I was less than taken with a game that gave me less control over my world then I had become accustomed to. For example, there are a number of actions which the player no longer has control over. Nobles now set the types of crop grown the resources needed to make the large number of items are rarely determined by the player. Producers now conveniently tend to collect their own raw materials. Unfortunately this means that they are often left with little time to turn the materials into a finished product. They can employ their family members to help out, but far too often I would experience bottlenecks in production where demand far outstripped supply, and because of new game mechanics there was no way I could plug the gap with some more houses for the lowest social strata. You can build servants quarters to aid producers but these servants tend to have a very different idea of work than I imagine was intended for them, usually preferring to admire the plants than do any actual toiling. This is one of a few areas of the game's underlying workings that manifested itself as broken on the player's screen.