Coming from developer Triskell Interactive and publisher Dotemu, Pharaoh: A New Era is a full-blown remake of the legendary 1999’s city-building title Pharaoh. A New Era celebrates the famous franchise by allowing players to delve into Ancient Egypt anew, complete with more than 50 missions including the expansion Cleopatra: Queen of the Nile.
If you are someone who enjoys the painstaking process of creating a sprawling city out of nothing, Pharaoh: A New Era will provide you with hundreds of hours of gameplay, both in the Campaign and in the Free Build sandbox mode.
The developers have put their souls into this remake, introducing gorgeous isometric 2D graphics, redesigned UI to govern your city more efficiently, re-orchestrated soundtrack and much more.
Are you ready to build your first Pyramid? This is our Pharaoh: A New Era PC review. And remember: “I’ve been kicked out of my home and through no fault of my own.”
Let’s tackle the most important part right away: you are not required to have played the original Pharaoh or any other city-builder at all to enjoy A New Era as a stand-alone, although some experience in the genre might help with the learning curve.
Out of the 53 Campaign maps, the first half a dozen or so serve as a really detailed tutorial (while the rest are somewhat less detailed tutorial) that will be holding your hand and introducing you to the various in-game systems one-by-one. From building and upgrading residences for your population, to acquiring food, to producing commodities like pottery, to gods, taxes, trading, armies and more. The updated interface will also be explored during this tutorial: the brand-new Nilometer indicator and a variety of Overseers to deal with. Even veteran players might want to take part in these missions to refresh their memory or to see just how the new Pharaoh approaches certain things.
If you are new or haven’t dipped your toes in the genre for a long time, these few maps will help you settle in and get over the basics. Pharaoh: A New Era features an impressive web of interconnected systems and it might be hard to grasp the entirety of it all at once. Thankfully, unless you decide to hop straight into the Free Build mode, you are not required to. If you’d like more tips, the developers have shared the first steps for any fledgling city out there.
Early on, the game is really lax to you making mistakes, offering extra currency if you go into debt (but only once) but even then it can be easy to fail if you don’t jump on top of things immediately or somehow mess up the logistics.
Some things turn you into who you used to be, and as such my inner child was awakened when I started the game. So much so that I had to get out there and look up old screenshots and gameplay videos of the original Sierra masterpiece because Pharaoh: A New Era managed to capture exactly what the game had looked and sounded like in my head. Which, admittedly, was far from the truth.
The adventure to build an impressive city starts anew with a few shacks built along the road. As you start humble, your citizens won’t want much besides access to a water source and some goods from the local bazaar.
If you are playing through the missions, you will likely have additional goals to meet as you go: upgrading a certain number of houses to a particular level, meeting the population threshold, periodically sending Pharaoh the requested resources and so on.
Regardless, as you continue expanding and building your city, it is crucial to pay attention to logistics: your production buildings need Granaries and Storage Yards for the produce, Bazaars will be needing an access to those as well to receive goods for your population, gold mines deliver straight to your Palace, your citizens are unhappy about the lack of entertainment and that particular building needs access to a source of water despite one being 2 squares away and– Oh, Bast is unhappy because you haven’t held a festival for her in far too long or dared to throw a few too many for another god.
As your city expands, the gameplay of Pharaoh: A New Age turns from barely crawling early-game to bustling process of tackling mission goals and resolving any minor (or major) problems that pop up from time to time. If you are good at these types of games (I’m not, despite all my love), it might be a relatively straightforward process compared to my bumpy ride. Sometimes it felt like the citizens were just looking for any reason at all to drop the hat and start leaving the city in dozens if not hundreds at a time.
However, all of that is worth it when you can relax, zoom out to the max and speed up the passage of in-game time to see your citizens scurrying along the roads like little ants, the lifeblood of your sprawling metropolis. When everything goes according to plan and simply… works, it is a feeling like no other.
The original campaign is sure to take you dozens of hours to complete, perhaps even coming closer to the intimidating point of 80 to 100 or so. The game also features the expansion Cleopatra: Queen of the Nile that I personally have not tried out in the original title and am looking forward to experiencing for the first time.
But the real replayability of the title comes with the Free Build sandbox mode that provides you with a variety of additional settings that can make your game as easy or as hard as you want.
Want to get your workers from the Global Labor Pool? Check. Disabling predators so you can enjoy a chill experience? That’s in. Fixed worker ratio or age simulation? Your choice. Difficulty settings are available as well, of course.
So if you just want to spend 10-20 hours building a city and tackling a great many minor problems, Pharaoh: A New Era will provide you with all that and more. The system of overlays and Overseers will also let you keep your thumb on the pulse of your evolving metropolis.
Oh, and do pay attention to the gods. Their blessings – or curses – can make or break the game in a pinch. Such as Seth wiping out an attacking army or destroying your own and leading to your city getting plundered.
- Note: the Steam key was provided for the purposes of this review.
- Similar to: Caesar III, Zeus: Master of Olympus, Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom, Nebuchadnezzar
