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Pharaoh A New Era review: the venerable city builder king has never looked betterPtolemy something I don’t know
Ptolemy something I don’t know
Pharaoh: A New Erameans I can play that game of my childhood on my shiny black RGB-lit bastard. Honestly though, the “A New Era” part is a bit much. Sure, the updated graphics are fabulous and the quality of life changes mean it plays like smooth peanut butter to the 90s' extra crunchy. It’s a good remake of a solid game, but the mummy in the casket is fundamentally the same.
Pharaoh™: A New Era - Release Date TrailerWatch on YouTube
Pharaoh™: A New Era - Release Date Trailer
If you didn’t play Pharaoh the first time around (and there’s a statistically significant change that you didn’t), it’s a city-builder, with the associated trappings. You splot down houses, and ensure that your new citizens have everything they need to keep upgrading those houses and thus maintain a stable population in as efficient an amount of space as possible. You need to build supply chains of food and goods to do this, which all need employees, and so on and so forth. The city is the point, and this is an isometric one, where you can look down on two walls and the roof of your buildings with immense satisfaction.
Pharaoh has had some of the best tutorialising campaign missions I think you’ll find. They’re great at easing you in from fundamentals to more advanced city planning. If you just want to get in and play, you can pick any story mission you want from the home menu, or play in a sandbox.
There are other small changes that make a surprising difference to how the game feels. The new UI makes it easier to navigate all your build menus, but the ability to copy-paste buildings is a blessing. Freed from worrying about some of the unnecessary minutiae, you can worry about the necessary minutiae. How much room is there on the flood plain for more grain farms? Is Osiris mad at us because we threw a festival for Bast but not him? Are we importing enough bricks for our monuments? Do we need another work camp so we don’t take those workers away from the farms? It’s a game that doesn’t have as many layers as something made in 2023, but the ones it has are decent, and have an endlessly pleasing theme. It’s nice to be mining clay and gathering reeds to make pots and papyrus.
That’s long-winded, but it’s a decent example to illustrate A New Era as a whole. It smoothes out the rough edges of a now-retro game to make the experience of playing it more fun. If you’re a seasoned Pharaoh-head it’s lovely to play, especially with the recreated soundtrack and the dedication to the look and feel of the original. Special props should absolutely go to the devs, who’ve obviously been at great pains to enhance what was already there and give nice licks of their own paint where they could. It doesn’t just look like you remembered Pharaoh looking, it looks better. If you’re new to it, A New Era is the definitive version of a stone-cold classic.
Has the world moved on from Pharaoh? You bet your dynastic ass. It doesn’t have the complex AI interactions of storybuilders likeRimWorld, you don’t have loads of different advisors relaying tensions around the city, or worries about public utilities in the same way as aCities Skylines, and it’s probably not as inventive in some ways as thenew class of city builderslikeTimberborn,FoundationorThe Wandering Village. In 2023 any kind of Pharaoh, even one with an impressively rebuilt tomb, is still a very well preserved old king. But what a king it was, and A New Era preserves it very well. How can you not feel a bit magic building a giant statue of a cat in the middle of your desert city?
