Builders of Egypt – Solid City-Builder That Doesn’t Quite Satisfy All Aspects

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• DEVELOPER: Strategy Labs
• PUBLISHER: PlayWay S.A.
• PLATFORMS: PC
• GENRE: City-builder / Historical
• RELEASE DATE: January 8, 2025
• STARTING PRICE: 19,50€
• REVIEWED VERSION: PC

Builders of Egypt, a development project by Strategy Labs, immerses you in the complex social and logistical systems of ancient Egypt. With its grid-based building mechanics, focus on production chains, and historical backdrop, the game invites you to plan settlements along the Nile Valley, balancing urban development, religious systems, and trade. While Builders of Egypt offers a solid city-builder experience, it lacks originality and suffers from technical shortcomings and unpolished features.

This title offers a structured, task-based gameplay experience through its Campaign and Sandbox modes. Campaign missions guide you through tasks like establishing production chains, managing trade routes between cities, and meeting the needs of citizens. However, the campaign becomes quite repetitive the longer you play. In fact, Builders of Egypt contains so much that, as buildings reach higher tiers, the complexity of everything increases, and those mechanics are quite well-executed.

Recognizable Gameplay with an Engaging Start

You start by managing simple resources like clay, bricks, and straw, and as the city develops, you move on to more complex goods. Each production chain has multiple dependencies; for instance, producing bricks requires clay, straw, and nearby labor. The game also features the flooding of the Nile, which demands careful planning to mitigate its impacts on agricultural production. In addition, culture is another important feature, with everything in the game depending on your prosperity and citizen desirability.

While I understand the developers’ desire to introduce features gradually, it often ends up feeling extremely boring. The main issue is that, after completing the tasks the game assigns you, you are often left waiting for the mission to finish. To progress, you have to speed up time and wait for resources to be exported or for buildings to be constructed, resulting in long periods of inactivity with nothing to do.

For example, in the fourth campaign scenario, where you are tasked with building a large monument, the process feels overly long. You have to wait for workers to gather and deliver resources, and the monument is built in multiple phases. Since the number of buildings you can construct is limited, you don’t have much to work on during these long stretches.

The gameplay of Builders of Egypt is neither particularly innovative nor revolutionary; it feels like a collection of mechanics we’ve already seen in similar games. It lacks originality and a standout element to keep you engaged. However, the sandbox mode is very fun. Instead of focusing on freer maps where we can relax and build and shape cities to our liking, the developers heavily relied on creating 20+ campaign scenarios.

Unfortunately, these scenarios are not rewarding enough to justify the time invested. Completing all scenarios takes over 15 hours, while the sandbox mode offers greater freedom to explore the game’s mechanics at your own pace.

Major Issues Center Around Graphics and Accessibility

The biggest complaint is the lack of clear visual indicators for resource locations and building ranges, which unnecessarily complicates city planning. Why is everything so hidden and hard to spot? Trees and grass often obscure key areas, making it difficult to find resources. The user interface also leaves a lot of room for improvement. There are too many tiny pop-up windows and categories that are easy to miss, like the tabs for technology or the import/export market.

While the game allows some flexibility to recover from mistakes, the poor map design and random events detract from the overall experience. The events feel disconnected; some involve the royal family, while others force you to hunt for treasure chests or missing couples. Although these side events offer solid rewards, they often make no contextual sense, and you’ll need to strain your eyes to find them.

However, Builders of Egypt makes a good impression with its 3D environments, rich depictions of the Nile Valley, and historically inspired architecture. The visuals successfully capture the grandeur of ancient Egypt, from the sprawling farmlands to the detailed monuments. Unfortunately, this beauty comes at a cost. Performance issues are common, especially on weaker PCs when cities grow larger. Also, object clipping and graphical bugs are frequent.

Sound design is also a major problem. While the soundtrack is excellent, the animal noises and random NPC voices feel odd and often clumsily cut off when the music starts. The narrator’s voice acting is particularly monotone and unengaging. Ambient sounds, such as busy markets or the Nile, are minimal and fail to create a convincing atmosphere.

Final Thoughts

In conclusion, Builders of Egypt isn’t a bad game. In fact, it has many positives, including a wide variety of buildings, impressive monuments, and even military features you can explore. However, reaching these parts of the game requires a significant time investment. The production chains are well-designed, the monuments look incredible, but the processes are far more time-consuming than you’d expect.

If you are a fan of the city-builder genre and are looking for something to start off 2025 with, Builders of Egypt is a solid choice. It’s not exceptional, but it’s good enough to keep you entertained for a while until bigger titles arrive.

Review copy provided by the publisher