Egypt: Old Kingdom

I have yet to see another game, that takes a historic era as serious as this one. I would recommend it to everybody having the slightest interest in ancient egypt. Sometimes the game has more the feel of a documentary than a pure game, but never so much as to neglect its gameplay completely. The resource management, that is the core gameplay of this game, is fun, and not without its challanges. I feel, however, without the strong theme, the gameplay could not fully hold its own. All the same, the theme is there, and its done wonderful justice, and so as a whole the game is a worthwhile experience. Being a game developer myself, I feel like I need to congratulate the team behind the game. In their very own way, they've created a game worthy of being talked about.

Well now, in my review of Predynastic Egypt I mentioned that I hoped GOG would get further games from these devs and here we are, just a few days later! Thank you, thank you! I loved the first game and am very impressed with the enhancements in this sequel. So many new features; there's more strategy and micromanagement, more ways to interact with other tribes and more options as you open up new territories; more wildlife and different ways to deal with them. Yes, deal with the dangerous ones in particular; I ignored the crocs and they gobbled my workers! I particularly like the new building structure, quite different from Predynastic, giving you more freedom of choice to build what you want and where. Replayability was evident from the start. Between setting your own rules and the starting prologue you can mix options and create different play styles in a variety of ways. There's even a sandbox and I love a sandbox! All in all, brilliant.

Had no idea what to expect and wanted to create a simple game. Wow, so many customization on how to build my city - awesome Interesting, each tile has so many things to do, animals, choices of building, floods. How to build my town? Let's get food up and running, damn I need more workers Pilllage!. Read combat "You are being Flank", quick DEFEND! - It amazes me how a simple combat, but hard to master could keep me on my toes. Alright, I conquered my city now, What is this Regions? Cool so I can switch from Micro to macro Management? No game does this so well. Now I'm boss, but getting all these plaques, drought, and my dead ancestors draining my Favor, I can't worships to Gods now, Switch productions now! What even more Macro? Decentralization... It's that good, and in addition, the art, history is extremely detailed and built with love for the Old Egypt

Every strategy gamer has a sweet spot in the push-pull between simplicity and complexity, playability and challenge and historicity and abstraction. This game is pretty much center cut for me when it comes to balancing those considerations. It skews toward the simple end of the continuim but with enough bells and whistles to require attention and reward with immersion. While emminently playable, it has enough challenge to afford a sense of accomplishment when well played. Though leaning towards the abstractions of a board game more than a precise computer simulation, it does so with enough logical grounding to allow me to feel like I am learning something about the inflection points that shaped ancient Egypt. The next time I try to pass on the bug for strategy gaming, this will be high up on my list of recommended titles.