Warriors of the Nile Reviews

I've been enjoying this a lot... it's a little bit like Into the Breach, but it's been a lot easier to get into for me. It also has a lot faster way to upgrade your units, similar to Slay the Spire. This has been my go-to game for the past month.

I currently play Warriors of the Nile 2 and I love both of them. What I like most about playing this series is that after a long period of pain, you can reach your ideal composition and wipe out the enemies and feel exhilarated. To order the best choice in any scenes, you can take your time as much as you want as the game never urge you. Comparing Warriors of the Nile 1 and 2, 1 is more difficult and 2 has more added features. Both have their own merits and I don't think one is better overall than the other. If you decide to give this series a try, I recommend starting with this 1 first. Good luck!

I highly recommend this game if you're a fan of either: Turn Based Strategy games or Rouge-likes. Or hell, if you're a fan of both. Get on in here. I find a lot of the time when turn based strategy games have their mechanics fleshed out, it almost becomes more akin to a puzzle game and this is no different. It's definitely a 'one-more run' sort of game, where each run can be wildly different with a lot of build variety with the different stage rewards to gear your party to a certain way. Additionally there are new 'morphs' for your characters which essentially serve as classes which added a much welcome diversity to the runs on top of the pre-existing randomised nature of the game. The art is amazing, and colorful popping out at you while maintaining a very 'minimalist' design as well as adhering to the much beloved egyptian aesthetic. And I absolutely love it. I got for sale after sitting in my wishlist for a couple of weeks, but I wish I had of bought it when it first released to give more of my money to the independent developer. Looking forward to their future projects.

Game mechanics are good and art is too, but balance is a real problem: The game is impossible to win while having no upgrades, then it's totally random based on which tablets you have at the end of each level.

Brilliant little tactical gem of a game. Each run you unlock more benefits that can help with future runs. With only 3 characters you have no room to be sloppy, but with a vast array of level ups to choose from each character has the potential to be your primary killing machine depending on how you build them. Hard, but not so hard as to be frustrating, and definitely rewards repeated play and skill mastery.

[H1]TLDR: Just get the sequel, which is a much better game both in terms of content and design.[/H1] This game suffers from multiple poor design choices. - Ranged enemies often outclass your heroes in terms of reach, They can cover 80% of their lane, with 3 moves and 4 trajectory tiles. - The warrior class is insanely overpowered. Packing not only high HP and DEF, but later on with the right tablets they can achieve larger AoE reach than your ranged heroes...like the what the hell is this? https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2865305097 The unlockable Hard mode further highlights the design issues, as enemies are further boosted, forcing you to do the same build over and over again while praying that you get the tablets you need. Hard mode runs always feel the same: your party either gets wiped out at the first boss, or steamroll their way to victory. The game punishes you a lot early on, but later on enemies fail to keep up with your OP broken builds. Because of that the first boss always feel more difficult than the final boss (including the true boss). [h1]PROS[/h1] - Decent replay value, while there are still stuff to unlock - Decent enemy variety and boss count - Secret boss - The core gameplay loop is fun, though it suffers from the before mentioned issues. The sequel improves on the base foundation! [h1]CONS[/h1] - Imbalanced classes - Imbalanced enemies - Hard mode is poorly balanced - Certain texts are untranslated. Eg: some unlock messages, carving, reward confirmations and notifications - Some skill descriptions and messages don't properly fit into their "text boxes" - Just get the sequel!

Warriors of the Nile was sitting in my library for so long without being played, and I'm sorry I didn't give it a shot sooner. It's an incredibly fun rogue-lite strategy turn based tactical game. You only have three characters, but you really have to plan out your moves and the characters' abilities. After each level, you're given a choice of a single upgrade for one of your three characters. This, too, requires some thought because most of the upgrades are good, but you can only take one and that one can only be applied to a single character. As you progress, you get gems that you can use to upgrade your characters or upgrade the upgrades you pick at the end of each level. All good stuff. The graphics are also really good and suit this type of game perfectly. I highly recommend it!

Interesting idea, but too unbalanced to recommend. It's a rouge-like tactics game, which sounds very cool in theory, I just wish the idea was given more time because the mechanics often feel like they are trying to force a square peg into a round hole and the power level balancing is all over the place. To the extent that 1 of your 3 characters is so underpowered as to make them completely useless unless you randomly luck into a specific ability or gear upgrade. The random nature of the ability upgrades is also very frustrating. The better rouge-likes use the random nature of the abilities/loot to force you to try out new strategies and adapt your play style, in this game the wild differences in powerlevel of the upgrades means that you can end up with builds a few stages in that are literally too weak to be worth continuing to play. Think FTL but x1000. this is made SO MUCH WORSE by the fact that the upgrades are assigned rarity so that the abilities you need to acquire in order to have a chance in fighting the boss levels are significantly rarer than the unhelpful abilities. Getting a super rare ability tablet doesn't seem fun and cool because you get to try out something you have never seen before, it just makes one of your characters seem like they will be viable in the upcoming boss fight. This would all be fine, many popular rogue-likes have those issues to lesser extents, except that instead of an action game where skill is one of the deciding factors of success or failure... this is a pure numbers game and if you don't get the right drops your numbers CANNOT be high enough to progress. This isn't a spelunky, or rogue legacy, or crypt of the necrodancer where your progression to a new area feels like a personal accomplishment. This is Final Fantasy Tactics, minus the ability to plan your character growth. The tactics are not even deep enough that you feel like you are really planning and executing a strategy; the board is too claustrophobic and you lose the ability to maneuver after 2 turns, you only have 3 characters so you cannot really flank or draw out enemy units into meaningful ambushes, 1 of your characters might as well not even be there. the tactics portion of the game is lacking depth and meaningful choices, which I could live with if not for the fact that the random ability system also removes any depth or meaningful choices from character development.

Holy cow, this is exactly what I have been looking for- an actual turn-based strategy roguelite tactics battle grid game. Easy to pick up and play. You will lose more than win, but you unlock things to help you later. This game focuses on the fights. No visual novel, dungeon crawls, or RPG stuff to take away from the point of the game- the grid battles. Even the iconic Final Fantasy Tactics had too much downtime with cut scenes and item inventory. Warriors of the Nile focuses on fast paced battles, and it is fun. The upgrades are passive, so no need to scroll through a menu and find zillions of spells, weapons, or items. The graphics and grid are least clear, not like, say Moekurii or Transformers: Battlegrounds. Truly, a dream come true for me. Wish the devs would continue either adding more to this game or make other ones like it.

When I review games, I try to keep a game’s background in-mind. In this case, there are two important factors: [olist] [*] This was made by two people in China. [*] The base price is $13 USD. [/olist] My point in mentioning this is to give the proper lens to my review, as I will “cut it a lot of slack” because of the above two points. I’ll have different kinds of expectations on a $13 dollar game compared to a $30 game. What is Warriors of the Nile? It’s a turn-based tactical roguelite game. The basic format of the game is that it consists of 3 zones with 9 encounters each. The first 8 of those encounters are normal challenges, while the 9th is a boss encounter. The battlefield consists of a 9x9 square grid with various obstacles scattered throughout. On your team you have 3 heroes: a warrior, a hunter, and a mage. The enemies will be a variety of units which mirror those 3 categories. As you win each encounter, you’ll be taken to an upgrades area where you can improve your heroes. The various ways you improve during a run include: [olist] [*] “Tablets”, which are basically passive powers for your heroes which can enhance them in a variety of cool ways. The game will always give you 3 to pick a single 1 from (1 tablet for each hero), so you get to choose “do I want to upgrade my warrior or hunter or mage this time?”. [*] Each hero also has a base of 2 equipment slots, 1 for a weapon, 1 for an accessory. The weapons are hero specific, but the accessories are flexible for who you put them onto. These items can give various improvements, such as health / armor / special-trigger abilities, etc. Note that Tablets and Equipment have a rarity system of Green / Blue / Purple / Yellow, so, RNG is of course involved in “how good of stuff you get”. [*] “Carvings”, which are more global bonuses in nature during your run. In this interface, it shows you a small pyramid with three tiers and a varying number of slots per tier: 3 on the bottom tier, 2 on the middle tier, and 1 on the top. These bonuses cost gold to obtain (gold you obtain from doing encounters) and can be all sorts of things, ranging from power-ups for the rest of the run to more-temporary bonuses. Note that you must have a tier filled up with Carvings before being able to construct the next tier’s Carvings. When deciding to make Carvings, you have to be careful, as every now and then an item merchant will come by during your run and offer to sell you equipment. Depending on how you like to play, you may focus more on Carvings for your gold instead of equipment because you can get equipment drops from the encounters. [/olist] While going through a run, your heroes’ health will persist and only get auto-healed / auto-resurrected after each boss encounter. This therefore puts a heavy emphasis on fighting against attrition and playing carefully to avoid dying due to smaller bits of chip damage. Thankfully, the armor in this game is on a per-turn-basis, so if you use your various equipment and tablet passives well, coupled with smart tactical placement etc, you can avoid taking any actual hitpoint damage on most encounters. To further manage health, when your heroes are wounded, sometimes the game will give you a one-time-heal tablet as a possible reward, or if you have any dead heroes, a one-time resurrection tablet. Obviously taking these quite-temporary bonuses are not ideal, but sometimes they can be necessary to “keep a run going” instead of just “you’re out of luck -- you lose”. In terms of the enemies, most of them are “generic” in nature, as in just having various stats for attack / health / armor / range / movement, and whether they’re a “warrior / hunter / mage”. The reason their class is important is because warriors and hunters can move and attack on the same turn, but mages cannot (these rules are the same for the player with their 3 heroes). As you progress in the game, however, fancier enemies can start showing up with different powers, things like: gaining attack every turn / healing allies / giving armor to allies / rooting your units / other nasty things, especially on boss encounters. For the battles themselves, how many turns you take is generally irrelevant. This is important because it allows you to play defensively most of the time -- focus on winning without taking hitpoint damage. However, a little bit into the game, you’ll unlock the ability for a few kinds of treasure monsters to start spawning in encounters. These treasure monsters will drop gear or gold depending on their type and are labeled as “will run away at the end of turn 4”. It’s the usual conundrum -- do I want to rush to get those bonuses, or do I play more defensively? Depending on the encounter and your team’s setup, sometimes it works, sometimes you’ll take too much damage chasing after bonuses -- it’s all a choice. I’ve also seen bomb types of “will trigger after X turns”, so, they have both positive and negative “hurry up” enemies which can spawn on some encounters. What about meta-progress, what does this roguelite have to offer? Warriors of the Nile isn’t as robust of a meta-system compared to something like Heroes of Hammerwatch, but still has a few nice things to boost your power. When completing a run (successful or not) you’ll get some experience to level up your account which grants blue orbs that serve as currency to construct buildings. These buildings give bonuses in three ways: [olist] [*] Direct upgrades to health / armor / attack to your heroes. [*] Unlock more Tablets which you can find on your runs. [*] Unlock more Carvings which are possible to show up on runs. [/olist] Similar to the trend which Slay the Spire popularized, this game has a “Hard Mode” which is unlocked after beating the game the first time. From what I’ve unlocked, I’ve seen a list with 10 levels of Hard, the first of which says “Enemies on normal stages have 10% increased health”, and I presume it only gets more intense from there. The reward from doing these increased difficulties is unlocking a legendary-quality tablet for one of the heroes. While Warriors of the Nile may only have 3 heroes, each hero has 3 variants to utilize (and a 4th listed as “Please Stay Tuned”, so it sounds like they intend to implement more). At first, you only have access to the base version of the heroes, but can unlock the other variants by achieving certain things in-game (such as [spoiler] the 3rd variant for all three heroes says “Clear Hard Mode Lv. 5 to unlock”.[/spoiler]) These variants slightly alter the heroes’ base stats / bonuses / appearance and are pretty neat in my opinion. My Estimation of the Game Overall, I’d say this game accomplishes what it sets out to do -- it’s a fun / smaller / cheaper roguelite tactical game which is pretty enjoyable to play in smaller spurts. Eventually, you will of course unlock everything, start climbing the Hard Levels, and try different combos of hero variants / tablets / carvings / equipment / see the bosses / etc; so it’s not a game that you’re going to be playing “over and over” (unless it really speaks to you or something). For $13 USD though? This 2-person project does a good job. Small localization notes: Remember that the developers are Chinese, so the English translation isn’t “perfect”. That being said, the amount of issues I’ve seen on that are quite small and aren’t “obtrusive or gamebreaking”. Sometimes a word in some interfaces will be in Chinese, but it’s a really obvious thing like “this thing is already constructed” or “you don’t have enough currency to get this”. The only other thing I’ve noticed is that the English typesetting isn’t “perfect” at times, with some awkward spacing on some text, but not really the end of the world as it hasn’t stopped me from reading and understanding what any given ability / item / whatever text says. I’ve seen some fixes (bugs / localization) shortly after the game’s launch, so I presume that the devs have a level of caring about it.