Nebuchadnezzar is a historical city builder with a name I hate to type. It was announced recently and will be with us next year, but it wouldn’t have looked out of place next to Impressions Games’ Pharaoh or Zeus back in the ’90s and early ’00s. It’s a bit of a throwback, and the trailer is giving me the warm and fuzzies.
The 16-mission campaign is a tour of Mesopotamian history that will task you with building Babylonian cities and massive monuments that dwarf everything around them. Expect them to be a wee bit more complicated than plonking down a shack.
In the Impressions series, the huge temples, palaces and pyramids were the products of lots of production chains, large resource stockpiles and plenty of population management—the rewards for your hard work. It looks like Nebuchadnezzar is following the model pretty closely, but it will also let you customise your monuments.
Instead of erecting prefabricated monuments, you’ll be able to tweak them with a monument editor that gives you control over the structural design, colour scheme and other details. The city builder will also have mod support, and modders will be able to make new monuments, as well as buildings, goods, missions and campaigns.
Generally you’ll be doing more tweaking than in Pharaoh, like choosing where people work and customising their supply routes. More direct control is welcome, but I hope it doesn’t bog things down with too much micromanagement.
It looks promising, and you’ll be able to start erecting your own monuments when Nebuchadnezzar launches on Steam in 2020.