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Builders Of Egypt could grow into the defining historical city builder - but it ain’t there yetYou come at the Pharoah, you best not miss
You come at the Pharoah, you best not miss
One of my favourite games of all time, wot I bang on all the time about, isPharaoh, the 1999 city builder from Impressions Games, which was the successor to Caesar III and - in many ways - was the high water mark for historical settlement-makers. There has been a Pharaoh-shaped hole in PC gaming for some time, and this time last year, when I put together my list ofpromising upcoming city builders, it seemed there were a couple of games vying for the twin crowns of the Nile. One of those wasBuilders Of Egypt, and after having a go on itsfree demo(sorry, “prologue”), I can confirm it is still exactly that: promising.
There’s really not much to this demo. There’s a single map, where you can set up a small settlement, with basic food amenities, and a single resource supply chain (clay -> pottery, or clay + straw -> bricks). Because you can’t speed up the game pace yet, I played the starting scenario for aaaaages, but it was a bit of a waste of time. I’d seen the vast majority of the content after fifteen minutes, and the rest was just a case of waiting for numbers to tick up. Did it excite me, however? Yeah, it did - with a couple of reservations.
That, I thought, was an extremely cool touch. Or at least, it will be, if it has an impact on the game beyond a cosmetic level. For example, would a brewery or a bakery basically function as a mint, in that case? What about gold mines, when they are introduced - will gold essentially become another trade good? There’s a lot of interesting stuff there to play with, if developer Strategy Labs (which used to be just one bloke, but now seems to be a studio, in a publishing deal with “simulator” churner-outer PlayWay) has the appetite to properly flesh it all out.
And that’s the thing, really. At the moment, I’ve seen a demo that does the same thing as a million and one other city builders released, or half-finished, in the last twenty years. It certainly gives me a lot more of a reason to keep an eye onBuilders Of Egypt, but it’s going to take a lot more than some nice-looking lily pads and a brickmaker’s yard to make me truly feel like I have united the upper and the lower kingdoms of mightyKemetonce more.
