Game: Rise of Jericho
Genre: Survival, Historical
System: Steam (Windows & macOS)
Developers | Publishers: Sudaka Games | Starseed Forest
Controller Support: None
Price: US $14.99 | UK £12.49 | EU € 14,99
Release Date: June 9th, 2023
A review code was used, and many thanks to Starseed Forest.
Rise of Jericho is a sort of historically-accurate survival/management game. It uses the language of video games to teach you a little something about how people may have lived 15,000 years ago.
The Gameplay of Rise of Jericho
You begin with two people in your tribe. You need to collect food, make mud bricks, and build shelters for your people before you can do much of anything else. As soon as you have a home, you will start to pick up more people, both from your tribe having babies and from people wandering by and asking to join. Once you are established, you can start to build other kinds of buildings. Then, you can make things like weapons and other gear to level up your human society.
You will need to constantly be monitoring your people, ensuring that each of them keeps on task. You have to make a lot of moves to make sure everyone is fed, everyone is housed, and everyone has the items they need to help themselves survive. It’s a pretty challenging game, in both a good way and in a bad way.
The Look of Rise of Jericho
The game is gorgeous. Rise of Jericho has this sepia pixel art that is so pretty and so fun to look at. Unfortunately, it does mean that sometimes important things kind of blend in a little since everything is pretty monochromatic, but I adore the way it looks. The music is a little generic, but it’s fine, and the sound design is great. I was pleasantly surprised at how beautiful this game is.
Why is Rise of Jericho so Awkward?
While the gameplay is fairly standard practice for survival games, there is something about Rise of Jericho‘s controls that makes this so awkward. You can’t just click on something you want done and have the game assign villagers; you need to click on each individual person and tell them what to do. After a while, that person will just give up and stop doing their task, even if you need them to keep going. Time moves pretty quickly, too, and people eat everything you pick so quickly.
To make things worse, you have to be ready for things that I felt I didn’t have time to prepare for. Wandering bandits will attack your village before you ever have time to construct weapons or a house, killing off some of your villagers. You end up with an influx of people and no way to feed them all well without constantly assigning villagers to picking food. I felt like I never had enough time to monitor everyone. Overall, this game feels kind of bad to play.
As an example, I started a game and almost immediately got a house built. I gathered as much food as I could, and I had eight villagers before long. I started to gather more food when a bandit came into town swinging, and he killed all my villagers but two and knocked down my house, which took food and bricks to fix. And this was all in the first day of in-game time.
Conclusion
Between the awkward controls and the too-challenging gameplay, I wasn’t a big fan of Rise of Jericho. I think the play is just not a whole lot of fun. It’s a gorgeous game with some great ideas in it, but it’s just not very much fun to play. I didn’t get very far in Rise of Jericho, and I doubt I will be coming back to it.
Final Verdict: I’m Not Sure.
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