Pharaoh: A New Era

Pretty good if you like the original Pharaoh from back in the day. I wish we had more updated games from the old classics come out. We need a Caesar game. :)

As a long-time childhood fan of the original and a big fan of this remaster, I feel obligated to write a positive review after seeing so many bitter losers straight up lie about this game in their negative reviews. First off the game is essentially exactly what it promised to be with exactly one exception(I'll get to combat later). It's basically a one to one remake with updated graphics, engine, art, quality of life features, and toggle-able game play settings to bring it in line with the later more refined Impressions titles like Emperor and Zeus. Specifically, a toggle for global labor pool(default in later Impressions titles because the citizen job finding system never actually made much sense; I can build a single house and that gives access to the labor pool? It also mandated the construction of slums which makes the game harder and more unsatisfying without adding any actual depth of challenge.) and dangerous animals(which always sucked ass because the only way to deal with them was to spam police stations or wall in their spawn points. The military, navy, and towers were incapable of actually dealing with eternally responding hippos, and since their spawn point was the river you couldn't wall them in like with hyenas. This is why they were never included in later Impressions titles). The game added much higher definition spritework and graphics, and also added native ultrawide support without having to download a janky, untranslated and unreliable fanmade ultrawide patch from some polish website that was itself a reworked fanmade ultrawide patch of Emperor like I had to do to get ultrawide to work on original pharaoh. The menus and icons have been streamlined and improved, obviously with the intention of simplifying the UX. They added a more intuitive speed up/speed down system, and added an actual pause button which is a godsend. You can zoom in and out much farther due to the improved assets and get a better view of your city. There is now a visible grid option you can toggle to better plan things, and there is a planning tool that lets you put down little squares that are visual only to help plan stuff. Dragging buildings and roads now tells you the number grid tiles you are building instead of just the cost, so you don't have to do math in your head or manually count tiles when planning. The missions, objectives, and game mechanics(other than military) are all identical, and they re-recorded the original music tracks with an actual band to give it better feel(I also see lots of people complaining that the new music sucks, when it literally is the same music) The biggest complaint you'll see about this game was buggy on release, which I can't speak to directly because I've never experienced a single bug in all my time with this game. Granted, I bought the game a few months after release and after some patches so it seems likely it did have some bad bugs on release, though they all seem to have been squashed pretty quickly by the devs. The only real change to the game that isn't a strict improvement or update is the new combat and military system. Instead of controlling units with a sort of sanded down real-time Total war like system, combat now auto runs on a standalone screen where your army and the enemy army fights, with your defensive structures dealing set amounts of damage before the fight starts. This is totally a matter of opinion, but as a longtime fan of EVERY Impressions title, the combat sucked, and it always sucked. It was janky, unworkable, and had very little strategy to it other than "put your unit next to the enemy unit and they fight." Units often didn't go where you wanted them to, the pathfinding was terrible, and avoiding damage to the city was less about good strategy than guessing which arbitrary spawn point the enemy was going to come in from this time. The military's morale mechanic made them useless at defeating the real menace of the original, HIPPOS, because you couldn't station them anywhere for longer than a couple minutes before they would force retreat. Trying to defend maps split by the nile where you had to ferry troops across the river using the transport ships was even more bug-prone and annoying to do. In essence, the new system got rid of all the janky and boring parts of combat, and boiled it down to essentially the same experience, which was clicking go and watching the soldiers fight it out. Is it dumbed down? For sure, but I think it is an improvement, because the combat in Pharaoh was never meant to be a focus or even really engaged with. It existed to give more challenge and context to the city building part of the game, which is 99% of the game. Whatever complexity of gameplay was removed from combat was more than made up for by adding in new products and industries related to upgrading your troops and forts, composite bows for archers, hide shields for infantry, etc. In the end, while I get why people are scared of change, I think all of the changes made by this remake are positive and only enhance the original gameplay and experience of Pharaoh. Great game, literally everything I wanted from a remaster of one of the first games I ever played, and I hope they do Zeus next.

This is good!
The walls and towers now have a purpose, the military is flatter, but at the same time it is more challenging than killing everything with two squads of archers.
I like all the changes, to be honest. I haven't encountered any technical issues in the last 20 hours of gameplay.
Strongly recommend!

If you can get over the cartoonish art style that reminds you of mobile slops, there is nostalgic joy of a classic to be found.

I like this game, I do. Which is why i'm giving it a positive review.
They've fixed a lot of bugs, they've brought in some good quality of life changes.
The only thing that irks me, is the automated nature of the combat. It feels quite dull.
Yes in the original it was super chaotic and mad, but that was something I actually kinda liked. Now it just feels too clean if anything.

I enjoy it, but its so jank and broken. Monuments take so long to build that I end up just sitting there for doing nothing except having an occasional festival for a god. I think had I not played and had a great fondness for the original, that I would not have a really good time here. But I did! So I think it depends on who you are

It is no where near as bad as some players would have you believe bugs maybe I'm sure I will find some, art style is fine its not fun but its not bad and during gameplay found myself as usual more worried about management than the art style nothing will beat the original but if we knock people trying to bring back the classics noone else will bring them. They have made changes so far some good some would not say bad but maybe less relevant the ai is better give it a try its not as bad as some people are making it out to be i was around at the release of the original game but those times are gone and this is a good honest try at making something faithful but also adding in some improvements
*edit*
read the tutorial prompts in the beginning there's more than people think in the way of quality of life improvements without ruining what the original game was