Like life, but your in control.
Children of the nile is set in ancient egypt and you guessed it, byt he river nile. You live of the land so you must grow, harvest, tax, distribute crops and food. You get this from the three states of the river Nile. When it is flooding your people must sustain. when it has stopped flooding the furtile ground is ideal for growing on, so that is the planting season. When thats over you harvest it.
This isn't a first person game you are a pharoh over-looking the people of egypt. It's veyr active and you can see your people oing about their jobs and such as they wish. The AI in this game is excelent, each of your hundreds of people has their own life they collect what they need and can fashion objects to sell, go shopping, have conversations, protest and whatever else they wish to do. The scenery is stupendous and you'll see what you want to see, you have a greta control of the camera and can choose to follow a single person or your whole nation.
The game is a strategy but the people have there own minds and can themselves determine some of the game. There are so many strategical elements to this game that i can't list them all but to put it briefly you could spend all week with a nation and never run out of things to do. You can even build greta pyramids, this isn't however a job of clicking on a person and getting him to make you a pyramid. You must acquire the neccessary resources like limestone which can be bought from travellers and other nations, mined or received through diplomacy. With the resources your still not done, you need to appoint Overseers to oversee the labourers into building your pyramid. With overseers you can't just make a single click and they'll train your labourers, they must be educated by a priest at a school and sent to become an overseer. You must build a school and priests quarters, for this you need bricks, the brickmaker makes them and the bricklayer lays them.
It goes on like that and as i said, you could play for weeks and have more to do. It's vast vibrant, compelling and basically an excelent game.