If you see reviews saying that this game is made great by the subsequent ones, just ignore them. You can't really expect children to review games. As flashy as W3 is, it strugles to capture the dark atmosphere of the W1. This is the only game where you can choose to go your own way and not get involved in events for one side or the other. Chosing the lesser evil is really really hard when your choice is between the the xenophobic genocidal regime vs. the terrorist supremacist group. It was really refreshing playing a game where the story is not some good vs evil, survival vs extinvtion boring thrope. W1 has nothing on W2 and W3 when it comes to graphics or mechanics. But the world is colorful, beautiful and full of lore. It feels more faithful the the central-eastern european heritage it comes from.
This is an amazing game. It makes me wish this company would go on to remaster Pharaoh, Zeus and Caesar using some of the new mechanics. I love how farms work as well as religion and supply chains. It is innovative and beyond beautiful.
If you are a fan of historical city builders then Children of the Nile is a must-play. I got to it fairly late. But it really took hold of me. I got into the genre with Pharaoh but over the years I played and replayed Zeus+Poseidon, Empire RotMK, the Anno, and Settlers series, CivCity, etc. CoN however is the crown jewel of the genre in my opinion. The reason for that being how real and genuine the world really feels. In most other games the civil and industrial aspects of the game are broken apart. The most you got was: lack of citizens = no workers. However, the mood of your citizens or their distance from workplaces was irrelevant. Not here. Here you feel as if every individual person's opinion is somehow important. Workers are not just sprites animating the screen, they actually exist in your town. They have a family you can track. They have needs and wants. A second plus is the building system. In most other games you build with some token resources (usually gold or some currency) used in most if not all economy-related aspects. In CoN you use bricks. Bricks are only used for building, they are not traded as every settlement produces its own, but more importantly: bricks are produced by craftsmen and their families, not by some soulless industry. That means that you can actually see the brickmaker go gather clay and reeds and make bricks, moreover his wife and children help out with the resource collection. This injects an amount of immenseness not present in any other game I can think of. A third aspect is how society functions. You start the game with your residence and some peasant huts. But your income does not come from the peasants but actually from the nobles "owning" the peasants. This spirals into a circle. More nobles mean more peasants, but nobles come with special needs. This translates into a very organic and paced progression from village to metropolis. So do yourself a favor and try this game. If for no other reason than for its originality.
