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Review of Pharaoh A new era: the venerable city-building king has never been more beautiful


I don’t want to be one of those people who “want to feel old?” poster types, this review asks me to point out that the original pharaoh launched in 1999, almost 25 years ago. It was one of the City-Building series of that era that included Zeus and all the Caesars, a series that was so good that they earned capital letters. Pharaoh also happens to be one of my foundational video games, and I played it when I knelt in front of my brother’s desk, at a time when families had one (1) color computer. yellow gray with CRT display. And now it’s back, baby.

Pharaoh: A New Era which means I can play that childhood game on my shiny black RGB tablet. Honestly, the “New Era” part is a bit much. Sure, the updated graphics are amazing, and the changed quality of life means it’s like smooth peanut butter to that extra ’90s crunch. It’s a nice remake of a game. snake, but the mummy in the coffin is basically the same.

If you didn’t play Pharaoh the first time (and there’s a statistically significant shift you didn’t), it’s a city builder, with the pitfalls involved. You divide the houses and make sure that your new citizens have everything they need to keep upgrading those houses and thus maintain a steady population in the most efficient space possible. You need to build a supply chain of food and goods to do this, it all requires employees, etc. The city is the main point, and this is an isometric point where you can look down two walls and roofs of his buildings with immense satisfaction.


Level selection screen from the main menu of Pharaoh: A New Era, which opens the quest called Pharaoh's Navy
Pharaoh had some of the best guided campaign missions I think you’ll find. They are great at assisting you from the fundamentals to more advanced city planning. If you just want to get in and play, you can choose any story mission you want from the main menu or play in the sandbox.

The distinguishing feature of Pharaoh is that it’s set in ancient Egypt, so your citizens want things like beer, pottery, entertainment in the form of juggling, pharmacists, and priests walking the streets. sunny street. In this remake, you can zoom in on them to see the details of the meticulously redrawn contents. Priests wear different things depending on the deity they serve (and that’s something to watch out for, by the way: Ra wants her fair share of the temple, but shouldn’t neglect any god-loving gods. favorites in the area, and they may all express their satisfaction or displeasure with various blessings or curses). If you’re good enough (I’m not), you can build your real pyramids and advance to the time of Alexander the Great.

My favorite Pharaoh-specific feature is the Nile. In other city builders, you designate areas to farm or plant your farm on fertile areas marked by the fact that they have a bit of grass. In Pharaoh you farm on the floodplain of the river, the workers are eager to harvest before the water rises and add more fertile silt. You find yourself naturally setting up your supply chain to work with this ups and downs. New Era adds a nilomter metric so you can track the flood season and how well it’s doing, allowing you to plan for tough times.

There are other small changes that make a surprising difference to the feel of the game. The new UI makes it easier to navigate all your build menus but the ability to copy-paste buildings is a blessing. Without having to worry about some unnecessary minutiae, you can worry about the necessary minutiae. How much room on the floodplain for more grain farms? Is Osiris mad at us because we celebrated Bast and not him? Are we importing enough tiles for our monuments? Do we need another labor camp so we don’t take those workers off the farm? This is a game that doesn’t have as many layers as a game made in 2023, but the layers it does have are pretty decent and have a pleasant theme. It’s great to mine clay and collect reeds to make pots and papyrus.


Farms in the Floodplain of the Nile in Pharaoh: A New Era


A ten thousand meter prediction in Pharaoh: New Era.  it will be a good year

The most important change in the New Era, at least in my mind, is that you can now choose to have your industrial and service buildings draw workers from a global pool, rather than using employ recruiters. Recruiters are still there, a process where a little guy wanders to your population centers and knocks on doors looking for unemployed people, but I never liked it for a very good reason. specifically.

In Pharaoh, you control the vendors’ patrol routes by placing barricades at the intersections – your water carrier, for example, doesn’t wander the map and miss all the houses – and you can create a The Sims-style trap by placing a barrier behind and in front of someone. In general, I like barriers; they don’t prevent any citizens from having goals, such as getting goods to and from the warehouse, but they do force you to plan your cities in elegant county loops. The problem is that for some reason, recruiters don’t count as having a specific goal, so unless you quickly clear and rebuild your roadblocks, they’ll never hire any. Who. The global pool of workers just means you eliminate the middle man.


Busy industrial and warehouse area in Pharaoh: New Era, there will be some full dumps, granaries and busy workers producing papyrus, beer and flasks.

It’s a bit wordy, but it’s a good example to illustrate the whole New Era. It smooths out the rough edges of a now classic game to make the playing experience more enjoyable. If you’re a seasoned Pharaoh, it’s fun to play, especially with the recreated soundtrack and dedication to the look and feel of the original. The special props should absolutely go to the developers, who have clearly gone to great lengths to enhance what’s already there and make their own nice paint splashes where they can. It’s not like you remembered about Pharaoh, it just seemed better. If you’re new to it, New Era is the ultimate version of a chilling classic.

Has the world moved from Pharaoh? You bet your dynasty ass. It doesn’t have the complicated AI interactions of story builders like RimWorldyou don’t have loads of different advisors dealing with stress around the city or worrying about public utilities like a city ​​skylineand it may not be as creative in some ways as new city builder class alike gorilla, Establish or Wandering Village. In 2023, any kind of Pharaoh, even with an impressively reconstructed tomb, is still a very well-preserved old king. But what a king it was, and the New Era preserves it very well. How can you not feel a little bit of magic building a giant cat statue in the middle of your desert city?

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