Builders of Egypt: Prologue

Builders of Egypt: Prologue is a demo for the full-game release by PlayWay S.A. It is a city builder resource management game based on Ancient Egyptian history. You start by playing through one of 4 scenarios or the main campaign. The aim of the game is to build houses for new inhabitants, manage labour, establish trade routes between towns, manage your resources. The main resource is bread which is used as a primary currency. When you build houses you need to ensure they have access to water. Every town needs a fire brigade to prevent houses from burning, an architect to prevent buildings from collapsing, a stockpile where your resources get collected and a bazaar for establishing trade routes. You can be attacked by aggressive animals or robbed by a thief. You'll have to build a police station to protect your town. The game has a lot of nuance towards different mechanics. For instance, your townspeople can be influenced by things such as their proximity towards their workplace or other buildings. There are many different items to trade. You can run out of bread or storage space if you're not careful. You can mine for turquoise and then refine the minerals into jewellery which can be traded to other towns. You can decide how much your town is taxed and how much your people get paid. There is a high replayability because there are many ways to play. The soundtrack is decent and thematic. The game is historical and does a good job at setting the scene, for some it may be too long so it's down to personal preference. There is also a voice over at the start of every campaign. The UI may feel confusing at the start. There's a lot of different keys, sometimes you can be sorting through trying to figure out what things do. The icon buttons are well designed. The controls are fine, I use a combination of mouse and keyboard inputs. The sound effects are pretty immersive with birds chirping and bustling town chatter. Although sometimes there's a random crunch noise that sounds like someone eating an apple. The graphics aren't great, the game looks dated even though it's a 2020 release. The shadows aren't very well rendered. The NPC characters mostly all look the same. There isn't much variety between them aside from a handful of different jobs and a woman NPC. Some of the mini-quests are broken too. Like the "find my wife / husband" quests where sometimes they aren't highlighted on the map. The game isn't well optimised. The save system is broken, I started a Hard game and then it saved as Medium. Sometimes when I save it saves as Medium and sometimes Hard. Don't know what causes this bug. Can't rename save files. The win conditions are glitched sometimes. I reached 12 prosperity and it was showing as 11/12. The game concept isn't very original, it was strongly inspired by classic games such as Pharaoh (1999) or Children of the Nile (2004). Overall, this game is OK. Has a fairly long tutorial. There's a lot to teach about buildings and managing resources and / or such as faith, economy, diplomacy and trade routes between towns. It's a decent introduction, albeit buggy. I still enjoyed playing this demo. Makes me wonder about if the full-game is worth buying. I'm sure it contains a lot more content that isn't locked. There's also another title called Builders of Greece. [b]5/10[/b]