Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile is a charming game, and quite engaging to play. It's one of those games that had a lot of potential, but just didn't quite achieve all that it could have. Some of the plusses: * Being able to go 3D. Walking through your cities is quite an experience. * The comments made by the villagers. Hilarious! Not so plus-worthy: * One scenario is much like the next. * The game is incredibly slow. Not performance related slow - just slow. To go into detail: CotN is very engaging, at first blush. It's a classic city builder, with a couple of twists. The challenge of the game is not over-growing your city. For instance, a major fact in the game is that citizens try to social-climb, just as in real life. Shop-keeping is more lucrative than farming. If you build too many shops, or build at the wrong time (harvest, for instance) you will have a problem of not having enough farmers. While the graphics and sound aren't really noteworthy, there's nothing wrong with them, either. Gameplay is fairly straightforward, and easy to jump into. The problems I have with the game are a bit more subtle. It seems as though once you get your city started, it's a waiting game. Wait to get enough stone, wait to get enough bread. Wait, wait, wait. And NOTHING exciting happens as you wait. The seasons come and go, everything goes on, nothing really changes. Good flood, bad flood. Life goes on. Speeding the game up is somewhat helpful, but not much. To me, if I'm playing a game and need to get up, I *want* to need to pause the game. I don't want the game to be so boring that I can leave it with no fear of missing something. Letting the game run while I cook dinner - there's something wrong with that. I've heard people on the official forum talk of "cooking" a scenario overnight as they sleep. Eh? My final take: it's a good game. It's not a great game, nothing stellar. It requires a lot of baby-sitting. I don't think you'll get a lot of gameplay out of it unless you're in love with city-building. My advice would be to go ahead and try it out, but catch it in the bargain bin.
Other Helpful Reviews for Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile
am a micromanagement freak and love all kinds of games where you can play God, build cities and manage budgets. It came as no surprise that I quickly got addicted to Children of the Nile, not just for that, but also ... Read Full Review
Children of the nile is a unique game, both fun and enjoyable. It certanly is a game that can be played for hours with no performance issues. The game has good graphics that are still not so outdated which makes it good ... Read Full Review
