Immortal Cities: Nile Online

By Barry White

I love my games big, bold and with as many bells and whistles as can reasonably be attached. I’m the quintessential PC enthusiast, choosing my graphics cards with care and bigging up the likes of Valve whenever I can. Casual gaming does not fit very easily into this mould. As such, the oeuvre of casual gaming kings PopCap, Bigfish and the like would not be something I dabble in very often (with Peggle being the one exception), so I wasn’t expecting anything from Egyptian city builder-lite Nile Online before I opened it in my browser. Sometimes it’s nice to be surprised.

Immortal Cities: Nile Online (to give it its full, unwieldy title) is most definitely a casual game. Knocked out by developers Tilted Mill when they weren’t tinkering with the likes of Hinterland, all you need do to access the game is part with your email address. This modest little package is entirely browser-based, without the need to download anything, which is nice, though it is not entirely free (strictly speaking - I’ll get to that). No sound and minimal animation means it’ll run on just about anything with an internet connection, with the side effect that most of the time it looks and feels like you’re trying to manipulate a screenshot rather than guiding your fledgling settlement to greatness.

Credit to Tilted Mill, the only real barrier that’s between you and actually playing the game is the complete lack of a proper introduction. Even the laziest and most hackneyed products of the casual market take some steps to introduce new players to their superficial workings, but the welcoming party for Nile Online simply points you at the Wiki and buggers off, which can be a little offputting for someone who just wanted to spend their lunch break playing a game instead of reading a wall of text. Thankfully, the Wiki contains a handy step-by-step primer for the game, which I would encourage you to follow. For those of you who won’t, the gist of Nile Online is thus: it’s all about juggling numbers.

You have a few primary resources at your settlement and a set amount of labourers to gather those resources. You need wheat to bake bread to feed your workforce and trade for other resources, clay for bricks and pottery and so on. But you will never, at least in my experience, have enough labourers, so there’s a constant challenge to maximizing efficient production of all your materials. This requires you to reassign your workforce on a regular basis, depending on what it is you’re currently trying to achieve. Want to upgrade your Palace but need some extra pottery? Then you’ll need to pull some men off the fields and into the workshop while keeping an eye on how it affects your farm output. Even at its deepest, you’re just pushing numbers around on papyrus, but in small bites it’s a nice little management morsel.

Everything takes a lot of time in Nile Online too. It’s designed to be dipped into for a few minutes every so often during your day, and harvesting, building and upgrade rates are set accordingly. For instance, it took something like three hours to upgrade my Palace at one point, so all I could do was log in, start the process and log off to do something else. While this slow pace might infuriate someone used to playing a proper strategy or management game, it’s the perfect set up for a casual game that is in no position to put excess demands on your time or attention.

And once you’ve got your settlement sorted and those resources harvested you can trade them with your neighbours once you build a bit of a navy. Or at least, that’s what it says in the Wiki. In practice it’s a little more complicated than that. Each city in Nile Online is run by a different player and will have access to one special resource. In my case it was Oil, which can be used to make Perfume, but only in combination with another special resource called Kohl. If I wanted Cedar, for ships and weapons, or Bronze, for sculptures, I would have to find another player with these who was willing to trade. So to really develop your city past a certain level (every time you level up your Palace requires you to spend certain, increasing amounts of different resources) you absolutely have to interact with the wider community. You’ll have to send them scrolls directly asking for resources or trade on the open market for goods. Suddenly, out of not very much, Nile Online turns itself into a sedate and interesting little co-operative MMO.

There’s even a level above that involving sending armies off to fight bandits with other players for further rewards and access to monument building, but the game is a slow burner and I haven’t had the time to explore that in any depth. Also, while it’s initially free, after a certain level you will have to spend items called Scarabs to continue developing your society. The only way to get more Scarabs is to purchase them with real cash from Tilted Mill, but you’re certainly under no obligation to. The more frugal or less interested player can still enjoy most of the game for free without having to shell out for these microtransactions.

A very slow pace and being easy to dip into make Nile Online a nice little number to distract you every once in a while, on a coffee break or when you find you just can’t stare at that TPS report any more without cracking up. It’s also a great game to tinker with while you’re doing something else (I have it open now watching for a message from a prospective trading partner) and for the cost of absolutely zero earth monies, it’s hard to rubbish the game for its modest ambition and execution. I just wish it looked a little better.

6/10