In 1999 a city builder based in ancient Egypt was released and placed gamers in the sandals of the most important person in the desert. Pharaoh and the DLC Cleopatra: Queen of the Nile were some of the all-time greats from the glory days of the now-defunct Sierra Entertainment. Since then, many city builders have innovated and changed the genre with various difficulties, updated systems, and less janky graphics.

Luckily for gamers who feel like the city-building genre has almost gone too far, a return to the classics is at hand. From Triskell Interactive and publisher Dotemu come a complete remaster for Pharaoh called Pharoah: A New Era. Let me tell you, this one is nostalgia-inducing.

Story

As a historic city-builder, Pharaoh takes players on a journey through the various eras of Egyptian history, from Early 4000BC to the end of Cleopatra. Going from small cities to sprawling metropolis’, the player will unlock more buildings through the campaign as they do missions and start to understand how the game plays. While the history is there as a general throughline of the campaign, there isn’t much to keep you engaged with it unless you are a bit of a history buff or enjoy learning about ancient Egypt.

Gameplay

As soon as I booted into the first mission of Pharaoh: A New Era I was hit with a wave of nostalgia for my earliest days of gaming, playing the original Pharaoh on my dad’s computer. As I set up plots for housing, rudimentary food gathering, and the statues and temples that adorn each city with almost reckless abandon, I was truly taken back to a simpler time with much better optimization. While the gameplay of the old game is there, all the jankiness of being an old game is gone with improved visuals, a reworked UI, and redesigned mechanics. What remains is a well-running arcade-like city builder with copy-paste building with a rising level of difficulty that makes you earn your victories, but is not punishing with its challenges.

As your city grows, you will need to take care of your people’s needs. Houses will only become better and more inviting if they get a supply of food and pottery from the bazaar. The pottery requires you to make a clay gathering building and then a pottery shop to make them. These interconnected production lines are vitally important to your growing city, and you will need to manage it in many ways. Along with that, make sure your workers aren’t living in gross surroundings by adding beautifications like statues and gardens. Temples will also add to the attractiveness of the area, as well as attracting the favor of those deities. With the ease of building, buildings spring up in a flash while large monuments take time and resources. However, these monuments make your city as a whole look better to the Kingdom at large and may sway some rivals your way. This constant growth and multiple focuses keep the player busy as they worry over the amount of food versus the incoming population, and dang it why am I only collecting 50% of my taxes?! Finally finding equilibrium as the city stabalizes is a brief respite, as something always seems to shift.

Watching your cities develop from these small hamlets to large interconnected boroughs is colorful and satisfying, and everything pops against the backdrop of the river, grass, and desert. Seeing the buildings change and develop as they grow is one of the biggest pleasures I have in city builders and Pharoah: New Era satisfies that very well.

Audio and Visual

As mentioned above, this remaster includes updated visuals, optimizations, and graphical options for quality. Pharaoh: New Era shines with color and character that takes the best of the original and improves it further. To add to that, the soundtrack is perfect for the casual city building with flutes and drums quietly playing as well as more orchestral songs blasting in when things get tense. There’s little else to say besides this game is gorgeous and sounds awesome. The voice acting for the citizens was also quite enjoyable, and I had fun selecting various people walking around just to hear their thoughts.

Replayability

City builders fit an interesting spot where some people can only stand playing them for a little, and others can spend thousands of hours exploring the intricacies of the systems and building their perfect utopia. The replayability will come down to what the player enjoys. For me, Pharoah will be a title that I keep installed and randomly go through phases of playing 10-20 hours and then not touching it until I feel the desire to play again. Before picking it up be sure to check out some gameplay and make the decision, though I feel most players that enjoy this style of game will probably play through most/all of the campaign, totaling around 80-100 hours.

What It Could Have Done Better

I hate to say it following the success of Dead Space’s remaster, but Pharoah: A New Era is a perfect remaster. Better graphics, improvements to various mechanics and the UI, as well as an option to change the worker system are all welcome and really make the game shine. While some complaints could be made about the original with some of its nonsensical systems of overseers and trade, as well as a “lack of spreadsheets”, A New Era makes Ancient Egypt great again. In fact, some of the pains are lessened thanks to a roadblock system, city filters, and the option to change how workers are staffed from recruiters walking around to a worker pool for the city.

Verdict

With the release of Pharaoh: A New Era, a new generation of gamers can experience the wonderful city builder in a better package. Including the Cleopatra: Queen of the Nile expansion, this title features over 100 hours of mission gameplay and a sandbox mode to build your own perfect city. For fans of the genre and especially the original game, this is a must-have for your library. I enjoyed the hell out of it and have many more cities to build before I put it down, and I think you will too.

Check out the gameplay overview below and let us know your thoughts in the comments! Pharaoh: A New Era is out now on PC via Steam and GoG.