Pharaoh™: A New Era

First let's see the good. For some reason I like the art style. I thought I would hate it, but playing the game it comes out as pretty nice. The next good thing would be that jumpy nature of the original is gone. Now the changes in culture (housing upgrade/downgrade) and worker availability are not jumping back and forts, like, from meager shantry to spacious apartment, and -100 workers to 20% unemployment. Monuments CAN be rotated. (although they could be rotated in the original by rotating the map) Naval combat does not drive me crazy - as there is technically no naval combat. And that's all. I started to list the shortcomings, but then I realized that in every other aspect the game is inferior to the original. I DO hope that the developers will pull themselves together, that's why I bought the game. But as for now, I do not recommend it to anyone. Play Pharaoh Gold + 1080 patch instead.

Whilst there are a handful of pros with this version bringing updated graphics, some quality of life changes such as global jobs pool it also finds itself lacking in both features and bugs which really detract from the enjoyment. One example being animals roaming the map - not a single thing you can do about them, randomly kill walkers which given walkers is a massive part of the game leads to frustration. The irony is you could deal with them in the original and the in game tooltip clearly lifted from the original even references this! Stick to the original and maybe relook when it goes on a sale after some serious patching.

I been looking forward to this remake for a long time but now that I tried it I'm sad to say it's disappointing. I didn't expect much, some updated graphics (I don't mind the new graphics at all), some fixes and balancing here and there and added quality of life features that was introduced in the later city builder games (Zeus and Emperor). But the game overall feels like a step back, with a clunky interface missing many of the old features. Simple things in the old game feels unintuvitive in this one, with the UI being oddly condensed and hidding most everything under several layers. Tooltips goes missing, sometimes they just refuse to show up when you try to understand what an icon means, just to show up for a brief second when you move the mouse. No minimap to keep track of things and I hear that the military aspect has been riped out. Yea, warfare wasn't super engaging in the old game either but it was a part of the game, removing it completely is just disappointing. At the end of the day I asked for a refund. The game isn't a worthy remake, it feels cheap and lazy. I rather just go back to the orignal and hope that one day someone makes a mod for it to bring Pharao into the modern era with more features and tweaks.

Play(ed) the original Sierra game with the patches to use high resolutions, so was looking forward to this one. Played it and asked a refund... Pro's: -Some added functionality like spreading workforce over map instead of by access to housing (in coding this isn't really an upgrade though) - visuals have been updated, the outdated old Pharaoh graphics have been cleaned up and given a new coating. They do look a bit "app-like" but it doesn't annoy me. The thing that does annoy me is the following: Con's: - Some functionalities have disappeared completely like combat, building paths over ditches, etc - It is like the developers took the source code of the Pharaoh 1.0 version (including all old bugs) and put a new shiny layer over it. example: -All in-game animations are identical to Pharaoh 1.0. -Music and voices are mostly identical to the Pharaoh version Conclusion and advice: Had to wait a long time for this to come out (wishlisted it over 2 years ago) and very disappointed in what was delivered. It's a graphically polished version of Pharaoh 1.0. Keep playing Pharaoh with all patches available and wait till this one has been bugged out and even then wait till on discount.

After 10h of campaign, one of the saves was corrupted and now I cannot play any level, load any safe or start any game without the application crashing. It is unmplayable