Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom (PC)

Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom is a city builder based on China. It includes 7 campaigns and a free play mode where some of the game's settings can be chosen. It comes with its own custom map builder where game maps or full custom campaigns can be made. There is a multiplayer mode where you can play against other people through the internet, although I've never used it so I don't know how good it is.

The game involves laying out ...
...a city that makes money and has an army to protect it from attack or to conqueror other cities. Houses can be "evolved" to a higher standard of living and contain more residents and so generate more money by way of taxes. To do this requires providing an additional service or commodity to the house. For example, every common house starts off as a tent. After you build a water fountain and the water carrier spawned by the fountain passes ... more

Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom is a city builder based on China. It includes 7 campaigns and a free play mode where some of the game's settings can be chosen. It comes with its own custom map builder where game maps or full custom campaigns can be made. There is a multiplayer mode where you can play against other people through the internet, although I've never used it so I don't know how good it is.

The game involves laying out housing blocks for workers to live in and then building a city that makes money and has an army to protect it from attack or to conqueror other cities. Houses can be "evolved" to a higher standard of living and contain more residents and so generate more money by way of taxes. To do this requires providing an additional service or commodity to the house. For example, every common house starts off as a tent. After you build a water fountain and the water carrier spawned by the fountain passes by the tent, it is upgraded to a hut. The main problem with the game working this way is that after a couple of games each city, for the most part, starts to look the same. There is only really one effective way to set up the housing areas, and the rest of the city is based around them. Although there are many different possible commodities that can be made in a city (ceramics, tea, weapons, silk, etc), the variety isn't enough to keep the game "fresh" for long. It gets boring very quickly.

One of the major features of the game is paying homage to Gods. There are twelve in total; three for each religion. Each month you can give either a small, medium or large gift to one of the twelve, and depending on the value and quantity of the commodity you give you will increase your favour with that God. Favour has very limited influence as it only counts for something at the two extremes of the spectrum. If a God is very pleased with you, they'll come to visit your city and then you'll get some benefits depending on which God it is. The two main ones are "blessing" some of your buildings so they are more productive; or fighting with your troops to defend your city or to attack another city. These benefits can sometimes be useful but they are not absolutely vital. On the other side of the scale, if you let your favour with all three Ancestors fall to "neglected" they will cause a natural disaster such as flooding to hit your city. The Ancestors are the only ones where negative effects can occur for not paying homage. I think this is an attempt by the game's developers to try and make this feature a big part of the game. The benefits are unlikely to be reason enough to pay homage, and natural disasters are more of an annoyance than catastrophe. This is defiantly under developed, and isn't the integral part of the game I think the developers wanted it to be.

Open play mode gives you a blank city map and to do whatever you want with, without objectives as in campaign games. You can customise some settings like the age you play in (earlier ages mean less buildings are available), the difficulty level, aggression level and quantity of other cities, and you can specify which map you want to play on. This is useful for testing out custom made maps if you intend to turn it into a custom campaign, or just to ensure you end up on a map you want to play on. A lot of the pre-made maps are awkward to build on. For example, a river or a cliff cutting across the middle of a small map makes it difficult to fit in enough housing or farm land to even begin to build up an effective city. There are way too many maps like that in this game and not enough big, fairly flat ones. Although there is no set ending to open play games, after a while there becomes nothing left to do. All enemy cities are conquered and love you, so that effectively ends it.

Campaign games have a series of objectives than need to be reached in order to move through the campaign. Typically, you'll start off with a blank city map and be given an objective based on industry, finances, population or foreign relations. This will be something like having 1000 population, producing 30 steel in one year, making 1000 denari in one year or to conquer one other city. Every campaign is very formulaic in what is asked of the player and so things get boring very quickly. The only notable differences between campaigns are in the early ones you're limited in which buildings are available. Thankfully, this limit only applies to campaigns and not to open play unless you choose it to when setting up. There's nothing more annoying than having that restriction enforced as other games in the genre have done.

The game's interface is picture based and so it takes time to get used to. The right hand side has a tabbed menu with categories of building on the tab, such as health and safety or entertainment. The categories are represented by a picture and it takes time to remember which picture represents which type of building. This is only really a problem for a game or two; and the tutorial takes you through the menu and how to use it as well as everything else a new player needs to know.

The graphics and audio are both decent. Every time you click on a "walker" (someone walking along the street like a religious priest or a food vendor) they will say a line or two that sometimes tell you a bit about how well you are running the city. If unemployment is high or there is little food, they'll mention it. There is a limit to the number of different things they can say, but it's a nice touch all the same.

Overall, this is a decent city builder but it doesn't have a great deal of replayability. It gets boring quite quickly, and has few original ideas in it. It's missing a lot of the depth found in games such as the Sim City series, but it is available quite cheap so if you're a fan of the genre it might be worth a look. 

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