Pharaoh: A New Era | Review – An unforgettable City Builder

Pharaoh

Management city builders are titles that were very strong in the 90s and early 2000s; a genre that unfortunately had a strong crisis after 2005, but which has been able to recover very well in recent years with some thick games including Cities Skyline, Frostpunk (even if it is more of a survival) and the various Tropicos. To celebrate this rebirth is also the return of a great milestone of the genre, Pharaoh, completely graphically reconstructed by the guys from Triskell Interactive.

Pharaoh: A New Era is the remake of the original by Impressions Games dated 1999 and which includes, in addition to various technical / graphic improvements, also the contents of the Cleopatra: Queen of the Nile expansion. We played it for a long time and we are ready to tell you our impressions in detail.

Pharaoh: A New Era, a strategic complex

Pharaoh: A New Era immerses us in a campaign that spans 4000 years of Egyptian history divided into 50 missions. To this day, it remains one of the longest running campaigns ever and also one of the most historically accurate in the market and one of the best-progressed.

So it is possible to decide whether to play the campaign in the standard way, carry out the individual missions in a completely random way, or simply throw ourselves into the classic sandbox mode to build our settlement (or city) as we prefer.

Pharaoh is still a complex management software, not so much to approach, but certainly to be mastered adequately. Once you learn the basics (place houses, wells and granaries) it immediately seems simple, but in reality the game slowly begins to get bigger and bigger, up to forcing the player to keep an eye on every single peculiarity of the city, from the gold , to food, to enemies up to random events that can obviously harm us.

Everything must always be satisfactory for our population: water, entertainment, employment and it is up to us to make sure that nothing takes a back seat. The further we go, the more the population increases and the more the roads begin to get busy, this involves creating more routes, more houses and more livelihood.

Do you think that's all it's over? Of course not. After our city has prospered, it must be defended in the best possible way, investing money in the military component which must always be kept under control due to the enormous cost it requires to be maintained. Although these defense situations only occur in the late game, it is always good to evaluate a good military investment.



Then there is the whole part related to the divinities, which as expected, must be satisfied to avoid possible malus or curses on our city. In case of satisfaction it is also possible to obtain bonuses that can be transformed into resources and so on. In short, praying the gods well and building the right temples is of course necessary.

Pharaoh: A New Era, a valuable remastering work

From a technical/graphic point of view, Pharaoh: A New Era is decidedly valuable, but still remains exactly as in the past: 2D isometric graphics, but this time in high resolution. It remains highly enjoyable to look at and does not require high-performance hardware, which makes it perfect to play with any available PC.

The main novelties of this remake are more concerning the quality of life, from the interface to the introductions of new mechanics useful for better tackling the game itself.

Already mentioned, the interface has been revised: now the structures all have a category and this allows them to be found more easily during gameplay, as well as the possibility of keep an eye on the flood periods of the Nile and a series of important alerts always on the screen that give us an overview of what we are doing, positive and negative.

Changed the population recruitment system, which now independently assigns those available to assign them to structures. And for those who were wondering, no, there are no new buildings accompanying the experience, apart from the posts, useful for preventing certain "citizens" from traveling along a street already occupied by other workers, definitely useful when the city becomes more large and complicated to manage.



Other than this, however, there are no other particular novelties: it is certainly a good remastering job, but a few more additions certainly would not have hurt the experience. However, we appreciate the effort to make it more modern and less cumbersome than in the past.