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.
Old World is an interesting game to say the least. A ton of options and with an added character system it looks and feels overwhelming at first. The rather clutered tool tip and lack of clear explanations doesn't help much when you are a new player but at least the ingame encyclopedia is easy to navigate an use. The economy is fine, with various resources needed to support, build and create units leading to you having to create a large number of improvments across your cities. The limitation of not being allowed to build cities anywere except on dedicated city sites is interesting and while I didn't have an issue with it I also don't really see what it adds to the game. Especially since cities in this game is kind of empty, most of the improvments are now built with workers on the actual map rather than from the city itself. The much praised character system I don't care much for, the characters are bland and uninteresting and I find myself not really careing about my own character's actions and events much less that of all the other characters I barely bother to keep track off or learn to remember. Frequently I find that characters that I actually do notice die within a couple of turns before they made much of an impact. As for combat, not my cup of tea. I find it too fast phased with units frequently coming in from across the map and due to how little damage my defending front line deals the attacker have a huge advantage. While I understand this is due to attacking in this game carrying a resource cost it also means that frontlines never seems to form and it turns more into random units being all over the place. I rather have a limited number of moves and actions per turn and leave it at that. All in all I can't recommend this game based on my prefrences.
