Pharaoh: A New Era Review

You know that over-rated trivia quote “The time between us and the Roman Empire is the same as Cleopatra is to the construction of the pyramids”? I would like to add another one. The time between the remake of the 1999 PC game Pharaoh this year is the same as the original game is to the end of the Vietnam War.

Though you may not feel smarter knowing that factoid, you’ll definitely learn something about ancient Egypt in Pharaoh: A New Era, a city management/RTS game on the PC. Like all city management games, you construct a functioning settlement in an isometric birds-eye view — like an omnipotent god of infrastructure and waste management.

Pharaoh: A New Era, developed by Triskell Interactive and published by DotEmu, boasts new specs and 4K graphics of which the maps and building models are pleasant to look at. What lets it down are the assets for animals and settlers looking more like they belong on Android. Nevertheless, you’ll be hard pressed not to think the game wasn’t made by a AAA company due to the attention to detail with each building, indicating what it is, how it operates, and/or how it was used in reality.

The campaign is broken up into historical periods of Ancient Egypt. You build your family lineage’s history, which unfolds as you travel along the Nile River. Building small villages in the beginning of the game, you’ll work your way up to constructing and managing historical locations and cities during the more synonymous periods of ancient history. Mission selection and sandbox mode are also available from the word go, including special custom maps with their own stories and conditions to test the most urbanised players.

The game mechanics are simple to understand; assisted by the early tutorial missions taking baby steps with the player. Roads are used to grid the settlement as well as for settlers to walk on, obviously. After that, houses for the settlers, sources of drinking and bathing water, along with hunting and agricultural buildings are essential to keep your community thriving. Infrastructure like bazaars, firehouses, Architect’s posts, and police stations keep the settlers safe, while gold mines, palaces, as well as entertainment and religious buildings are used to increase currency and happiness in the community.

The challenge comes in the later missions as you attempt to balance everything while battling threats like fire, drought, crime, war, and overspending. These can be your downfall if not adequately planned and positioned on the map. Other issues you’ll come across are from wild animals. As you’re basically building a city from scratch in every mission, you’ll sometimes have hyenas or crocodiles snatch away unarmed Egyptians, so keep a police station nearby if you don’t want to re-enact The Ghost and The Darkness. Plagues and god-like disasters can destroy your progression, where I just loaded back to a previous save and built as many religious structures and physicians to ward off the issue.

All these trials can be monitored via specific filters, with a few crucial to micro-managing the needs of your people.

Pharaoh: A New Era is a great piece of educational material for all ages. I’m not sure it can be implemented into the modern classroom, as Pharaoh: A New Era is player-first orientated, yet the game represents an insight into how a civilisation goes from a primitive (in our current time) to a rich landscape full of new technologies like irrigation.

Listening to the remake while I’m writing this review, it seems like the developers have reused audio files from the old game which is a smart choice as the soundtrack and sound effects still hold up. If not, then the sound design did a great job making it sound retro.

The only issue I had while playing happened more than I liked. When you point the cursor too far into a direction the camera goes Mach One across the map. It can be prevented by using the W/A/S/D controls to move the camera while using your mouse to build, as well as lowering your cursor sensitivity. 

Overall, Pharaoh: A New Era truly embodies what people want from a city management game while achieving a sense of understanding to its source material. If you want a blast from the past with a fresh coat of paint that can contend with recent releases then Pharaoh: A New Era is right down your alley; right next to the granary and the many shrines to Bast, the game’s cat god.