Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom

List Price: $19.99 Discount Price: $9.57

Features:

• Start building your empire by attracting immigrants -- use them as workers and farmers to create commerce
• Introduce merchants, soldiers, doctors, craftsmen and guards to make your city safe and prosperous
• As your cities grow larger, you'll have to deal with new obstacles and puzzles -- deal with new technologies, forge alliances, and build monuments to your own everlasting glory
• Beware the barbarians -- they'll come to invade and take your wealth, so prepare castles, walls and a standing army to defend against them
• Compete or cooperate with other kings as you go online for multiplayer action!

Accessories:
PC Gamer (1-year)	Games for Windows: The Official Magazine

Customer Reviews:

Totally Hooked [Posted on 2007-03-10]
I love this game.....it is so addictive....in fact, this is my second time purchasing it because a friend of mine played it once and begged for the CD-ROM. It's a great game to break the monotany of the office. Kudos....Sierra!!!!!!

Wrong Title ......... [Posted on 2007-04-25]
As a Native Speaker of Chinese and as a Chinese Myself, I am confident to say
that "中國"(Chinese characters meaning China) means Central Kingdom not "Middle Kingdom"

Very addicting game [Posted on 2007-07-23]
It's sort of like SimCity meet age of empires. I would recommend it to anyone who's looking for a game to play in their spare time; it certainly kept me entertained for 2/3 of a summer.

Highly Addictive [Posted on 2007-08-07]
I have always loved this franchise of games and this version did not disappoint. Improved gameplay, story setup and graphics from Zeus. How can you go wrong? Impression games hit this one out of the park.

Not as good as Zeus [Posted on 2007-10-19]
This game is an inferior version of Zeus. Although both games share the same basic principles of agriculture, housing, industry, distribution, religion, and arts, Zeus had a much lighter touch and thus was more entertaining. Emperor does not have as rich a voice acting portfolio as Zeus and instead of humorous voice portrayals like the John Wayne cavalry and New Yorker inspectors in Zeus, you get very tedious, borderline offensive Chinese accents in English. (Additionally, pronunciations of Chinese words are almost always wrong outside of the main intros.)

Like Zeus, combat has many bugs, which sometimes threaten to frustrate the player into giving up. For example, if you launch an invasion, an opponent will sometimes see this as a great opportunity to attack you. Fair enough, but what's stupid is when said invader is the city you are going to attack! And the two armies blithely cross pathes and you get defeated because (ha ha) you have no military. Or worse, the tendency for a defeated city to IMMEDIATELY and repeatedly rebel. Sometimes they will rebel, presumably because you are "weak," when you are returning from conquering them. Just awful and tedious. Also, the computer controlled cannons are like incredibly virtuosos with pinpoint accuracy, but your own cannons seem to be completely ineffectual. Also, sometimes your invasions will fail for no reason, and the program gives you mounds of weapons. I can only imagine that this is because for plot reasons the programmers don't want you to win yet, but they don't want the rigged outcome to damage you too badly.

The same factors that led me to become obsessed with Zeus way back when, the fun challenges of figuring out optimal housing and distribution, etc., are in play here, so all is not lost. However, the distribution system is so dumb sometimes, it boggles the mind. Suggestion for future games: provide different settings for accepting goods from industry and other warehouses, and for distributing to industry and other warehouses.

As a stand-alone game, Emperor would be quite commendable. But as a successor to Zeus, it is a step backwards.

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