Immerse yourself in the history of Ancient Egypt with 50 missions and over 100 gameplay hours in Pharaoh™: A New Era, a remake of Pharaoh (and the expansion Cleopatra: Queen of the Nile), one of the best city builders from the golden age of Sierra Entertainment. Stone by stone, build your cit...
Immerse yourself in the history of Ancient Egypt with 50 missions and over 100 gameplay hours in Pharaoh™: A New Era, a remake of Pharaoh (and the expansion Cleopatra: Queen of the Nile), one of the best city builders from the golden age of Sierra Entertainment. Stone by stone, build your city and manage all aspects of its development to ensure it prospers and makes you a powerful and revered Pharaoh.
Develop your city by cultivating the fertile lands along the banks of the Nile valley. Erect the iconic monuments of Ancient Egypt, including the pyramids, the Sphinx and the Lighthouse of Alexandria. Build temples and mausoleums to help manage all aspects of your city's health and culture as well as the predominant polytheistic religion of the time.
Ensure your city is prosperous enough to deal with economic or political crises, or even plundering by enemies. A Pharaoh takes care of its people and does whatever it can to earn the favour of the gods.
Pharaoh™: A New Era celebrates 20 years since the release of the famous franchise with a complete remake, including more than 50 playable missions and over 100 hours of gameplay.
The "Campaign" mode teaches you the game basics while allowing you to experience a unique story in the heart of Ancient Egypt and explore all aspects of life in a thriving city.
You have everything at your disposal to build an entire city and manage all its fundamental elements to ensure it flourishes: the economy, internal and external trade, culture, health, agriculture, education, etc. To help you monitor your progress, various indicators show you the overall well-being of your city and its residents.
The journey back in time is really brought to life with this Ultra HD remake, which upgrades the gameplay mechanics to modern standards and completely redesigns the captivating soundtrack and gorgeous isometric 2D graphics.
A Cult Classic Remade: Rediscover 4,000 years of History in 4K HD in this remake of the cult classic city-builder Pharaoh and its expansion Cleopatra: Queen of the Nile
A Rich, Complexe and Unique Experience: Trade and develop your economy with neighboring cities and make your civilization thrive while facing the elements with the flooding of the Niel, the wars with your enemies, the furies of the Gods and the plagues of Egypt
A Fortune of Fun: Lead your people through a rich 50+ missions and 100+ hour campaign, or unwind and build the metropolis of your dreams in a Free Build mode
Breathtaking Views: Marvel at the beauty of budding settlements and lively cities sprawling across the Egyptian sands, brought to life through fully reworked, intricate hand drawn art
Modern Refinements: Overhauled menus, a refreshed UI and various adjustments make Pharaoh: A New Era’s classically inspired fun feel like second nature to play
A Fully Reorchestrated Soundtrack: Take in stirring recreations of the original soundtrack’s melodies, rearranged and performed with traditional oriental instruments
More than just a remake, Pharaoh™: A New Era also brings hundreds of gameplay changes, enhancing the original experience to new standards:
New reworked UI: with overhauled menus and a fully redesigned UI, build your city more efficiently and raise your empire to new heights
With the New Nilometer Indicator, track both when the Nile floods occur and its quality
Manage your people more easily and efficiently with new and redesigned mechanics, like the Workers tooltip, the Fixed Worker Ratio or the Global Labor Pool
Develop your city with ease with the ability to quickly copy-paste buildings
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
