Tilted Mill's Children of the Nile is a city building game. It caught my interest through Desura's Indie Royale Bundle. In fact, I bought the package because of the adventure games in it, like The Dream Machine or Puzzle Agent 2. The building game was the least one I was willing to buy and the first one I installed, ironically.
Why did I play it?
They totally got me with the description of the features: Your task is not only to build a monumental pyramid but to look after every peasant's interest. In every building game you create little economic circuits on the back of your villagers who collect food and manufacture goods. With the time they not only supply food for themselves but also for the wealthier population stratums - the nobles, who often have higher requirements.
For every family you have to supply food, merchant goods, health care, religious worship, mortuary, entertainment and safety. If not fulfilled, the inhabitants get unhappy, make demonstrations in front of your palace or leave the place you built for them.
At this point the game strongly reminds me of the Anno series. But Children of the Nile puts a higher emphasis on families. They have names, children that go studying to climb up to a higher class, clean their houses or go shopping. Even standing around, "deciding what to do" and death are part of their life. They have a daily rhythm that makes the game deeper and the little characters individual.
Criticism:
Of course this is just another table to calculate in the micromanagement. And it can become an extremely annoying job to arrange, especially when every class and guild wants their own shrine to worship their god - one for the farmers, one for the scribes, one for the soldiers, ...
Another thing that is no fun at all is the prestige system. In order to win you have to gain a certain level of prestige, next to other requirements. You can do this by upgrading your palace, arranging a lot of tombs in your city or building decorative monuments like pyramids. The last one is as dull as the shrine building, regardless how well your city is established, you have to play on for hours to gain stupid points or fulfill everybody's worship desire.
In my opinion these are problems most building games have - The Settlers and Anno both get a very passive experience for the player near the end of every level, letting her just watch instead of build.
At least in Children of the Nile you are encouraged to decorate your whole city with plants, trees, plazas, little gardens, statues and other bits and pieces - that are free of charge! - which helps a lot to be animated over the boring moments the game has.
Conclusion
I can highly recommend this game to everybody who loves the Anno series, but desires to build cities within a setting Anno didn't use yet. It's not as polished as the German pendant, but full of loveable details that let you enjoy the game for hours! And the soundtrack is gorgeous. Moreover both bigger games mentioned in this article are published by Ubisoft. It is good to see a game from another forge that tried a different style.
Tilted Mill exists since 2001, became an independent studio in 2008 and is known for Hinterland - a strategy building RPG game (Loot, Level, Built). I think that's what I'll go for next.
