This is a great concept, and for fans of games similar to the wildly successful Sims series, makes for an intriguing game. However, a little too much has been taken out of the whole city-micromanagement experience for the game to be a wholly joyful experience for some of us.

Aptly named Children of the Nile, players will get to enter the lives of the inhabitants of their empires, following them around as they go about their day-to-day tasks. Each typical house is comprised of a man, his wife and a child. The man is the main bread winner (and I really mean bread!, which is the currency of the game), but the woman and child also contribute to the home. The woman will often be the one who takes the raw material the man brings home and crafts it into a finished product, and is the main household shopper. The child will also, at times, work.

The inhabitants all have personalities as prescribed by their professions, and the game has been designed to really focus on the fun of dropping in on their lives. Once a house has been built and inhabited, the resident family immediately begins to go about their daily business. Farmers will go plant, artisans will gather raw materials, the women will go shop and also make finished products from the raw materials, the children will play or work, and the Pharaoh will travel around surveying his happy people.

The method of viewing all this action is the best part of the game, and really adds to the enjoyment of playing a city-building game. The camera has been designed to be a free-moving vehicle for following the people around, and it works tremendously well. Players can effortlessly zoom in and out using the mouse wheel or the keyboard, and rotate the viewpoint at the same time. Individual characters can also be followed around, which is the best feature of this game, in my opinion. Simply choose a house, pick an inhabitant from the iconic pop-up menu of the house, and choose another icon to follow him or her.

The interface menus work extremely well in this one aspect of the game, namely to eavesdrop into the lives of the inhabitants, but are schizophrenic in other management areas. It's too difficult to figure out why certain types of people may be unhappy, or lacking bread. While a general menu list exists that will show the various groups of people and if they are unhappy or not, this is unhelpful in determining the source of the unhappiness or the means of fixing it. For instance, evidently entertainers need lots of nobles around who can afford their services and therefore keep them supplied in bread, but once an entertainer is unhappy, just building lots of upper class neighborhoods after the fact doesn't seem to be the answer. The entertainer is still very unhappy, and lacking in bread or common wares. For this particular instance, deleting the entertainer's home and then rebuilding a new one was the answer. Evidently, the nobles have to be in place first, and if not, the symbiotic relationship can't obviously be fixed.

Unlike the Impressions games, the buildings themselves are not a primary focus. In those games, each building and its workers were vital to the game's overall function, as they provided necessities by walking around areas of the game designated by roads. It therefore was necessary to plan out each building's location meticulously, for the most economical usage of movement to provide maximum influence in a small area, so as to not run out of resources before the workers could get to a house.

In contrast, roads are totally irrelevant to the resource distribution, as the people will simply walk any which way they desire to get to where they're going. This may make it easier and less of a hassle when planning out sections of town, but it also makes for some sloppiness, aesthetically speaking. Decorating is also totally irrelevant, and doesn't add one iota to a town's improvement.

The gameplay has three main methods of play, a campaign mode, a scenario mode which is the sandbox mode, and an editor to design different scenarios. In the campaign mode, players will follow the dynasty of Pharaoh, as he builds his vast empire into the mightiest one of the time. Common tasks will include building up prestige with the ultimate in monuments, crushing erstwhile opposing empires, and generally spreading influence around the world. Often there will be a choice of either difficult or easy scenarios in each chapter of the game. There is also a difficulty level in the scenarios.

Graphically, the game looks good, but could be better. The buildings just aren't as pretty as the Impressions ones, even though those games are pretty old now by gaming standards. The details, while good, are rather bland in terms of decorativeness. The characters seem to have had more attention spent on them than the buildings, probably because they are the primary focus of the game, but in close up, they lose a little appeal and tend to also walk through walls.

I was looking forward to this game, and on the whole, have enjoyed playing. I am a big fan of the city-building games from Sierra, several of which Impressions designed. However, my favorite of these was Caesar III, which was the king of the micro-management type of game. This game is great, but did have some serious flaws when it came to getting supplies from one end of town to another efficiently in the latter, more difficult scenarios of the game, when efficiency is rated and tied to the campaign's successful completion. The last but one scenario literally took me months to complete, simply because I couldn't get wheat distribution streamlined.

That said, the satisfaction in finally finishing and becoming supreme ruler was a wonderful feeling, and was in direct proportion to the difficulty in solving the problem. This wasn't the case with many players, though, and subsequent games in the series lessened the micro-management aspect, which pleased many, but not myself. I liked all the fiddly details, and missed them in Zeus and Pharaoh, both games that were rated by many as an improvement on Caesar, but not by me.

So, I missed the block-by-block city planning, and found the entire planning experience a little too easy, overall. I could literally walk away from the game for hours, and come back to find everything still running pretty much as I had left it, with no fires, crime or other horrendous things happening because of my inattention. To be fair, though, the more war-like scenarios would probably have been more attention consuming. I don't like fighting, so tend to pick the more peaceful scenarios in a campaign, if possible.

But, I also have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed the focus on the people, which is a wonderful way to involve players personally in a game of this type. It's really neat to follow one guy around, and watch him gather various items, and then take them back to make them into finished products. This animates the whole doll-house experience.