Freemind S.A. has extended their building simulation games (another reviewed here) into the country of Egypt where a fellow author and myself would love to visit. Welcome to Egypt Frontiers where you, a master builder, help supervise and build Egyptian temples and monuments. Other than the jerky start I had with the first cinematic when you arrive on site, it was looking promising, but as my preview spills out you'll find a few flaws in both the graphics and the gameplay. As this game progresses through Early Access, I hope my small contributions help with the tuning up of the game.
I really enjoyed Egypt Frontiers with the setting, music, and projects you have to work on. However, the graphics in some portions of the game came up short. Like in this image below, the workers seem to be in the ground underneath the roadway you are making for transporting of brick to the next location. The help files have a couple of spelling mistakes, but the instructions are clear with visuals. There are also a couple of spelling mistakes in the dialogue screens and in the menus.
Since Egypt Frontiers is still in Early Access, there is a lot of room for improving, fixing, and adding to the game. I am excited to see what comes up in the coming months. So far, I am also enjoying the gameplay and the music which makes me feel like I'm riding a camel, however I didn't see a single one during gameplay. A couple showed up in one of those transition screens that gives you information of Ancient Egyptian culture though!
In Egypt Frontiers you arrive at the pier of Giza where the Vizier instructs you on where to go and what to do. In Ancient Egyptian fashion you are given the tools to construct your own home, housing for workers, monuments, temples and the final Egyptian landmark. With each of the projects you are given recipes to both find and harvest the resources needed to make the tools and items required for that particular quest. I was lost a few times as to where to place things or where to go.
Your most important tool is the triangle you have to make as your first quest. After the triangle is made you equip it to your hotbar. It calls up all the things you can build with a simple left-click of your mouse. The object you have to build from your selection is in a green ghost image that you can delete at any time.
Once you finish the in-city quests, you are directed to the staging area where you, the supervisor, assign workers to production stations. After you have them all assigned, the resources needed to build the temple start filling up the pallets in front of the canopy-covered work areas. If you did the quests right, you have a couple of extra workers you can assign to actually build the structure.
After that building is completed you are directed to the next area where you do a clean-up of the site and build housing for the workers. You are taught how to repair and use your next piece of equipment. It's in this area where the first of the big graphics issues I had that appeared. The one in the first image above where the workers aren't standing on the ground placing the wooden road. Another one where the workers were in the blocks instead outside the block area hammering them in. There was also the worker in midair on the roof placing slabs of stone!
Right from the beginning in Egypt Frontiers there were numerous little things that also stood out. I found the cursor very annoying being only a small dot instead of a hand or an icon of a hammer or tool similar to what you are working on. A good example would be that hand for collecting resources, or the hammer for breaking of stone. That kind of thing would be easier to line up for the process you are currently doing.
Don't worry though as I had sent in a bug report about it. I am also disappointed in the structure of the bug report in the game as there was no pop-up screen to add this image to the report. Just a form you fill in and check off what you're including. Once you hit submit though, nothing showed up on what to do to add an image, log, or game save. Just check boxes in the form itself and the dropdown menu for what type of bug it is.
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In Egypt Frontiers you will find transition screens with information about Ancient Egypt. I actually found a few of them very insightful as I have read a lot about Ancient Egypt. Also, some of the dialogue screens had hilarious spelling errors, while others were missing a word or two. I dropped in two images where you can see one of each above.
And with that I shall sign off with the hopes that when Egypt Frontiers releases as a complete game that all those little bothersome bugs will be fixed and smoothed over. The game itself is a lesson about Egypt back at the time of the pyramids. Parts of it felt like one of my regular camping trips, but all the same, the town buildings, the people, those boats! I am amazed. I hope at the end we get the history of the final monument built because my game froze right as I placed the last brick!
