Pharaoh Review

Platform: PC

Publisher: Impressions Games

Rating: Everyone (E)

About Pharaoh

Pharaoh is an impressive strategic city-building game set in ancient Egypt. Build your civilization from small huts and basic farms to thriving cultural centers with massive pyramids, statues and temples. Generate income with profitable production of items and food. Keep the Gods happy or suffer destructive consequences. Become the Pharaoh. Let all your accomplishments be remembered through all time.

The Pharaoh’s Modes of Play

Oh great pharaoh, what challenges will you face? Maybe you'll find out in the game's two different modes of play: Mission and Campaign.

In the Mission mode you get to select scenarios from different points in ancient Egyptian history. Build your dynasty in the Old, Middle or New Kingdom eras. Some missions are based on building a certain population number. Others require you to build monuments, go to war, or raise your cultural levels. The Mission mode is the best because your goals are clear. Plus you can always avoid the ones that have scenarios you don't really like.

The Campaign mode is basically many missions tied together into one overall goal. It has choices from all eras as well, but they are a lot more challenging and mix in multiple types of scenarios: production, building, population growth and military conflicts. I have yet to complete a Campaign, and I have been playing this game on and off for a couple of years!!

Why Play Pharaoh?

Pharaoh is an involving, but fun game. In each mission, certain resources are available, with variable land sizes and terrains. You start building slowly, getting a basic foundation with small homes, water and food. When people start coming over, the fun begins. It is a constant battle of keeping the people happy, employed and safe. You also have to worry about the wrath of the gods. The ancient Egyptians believed in many Gods, and in this game there are several. Build temples to appease them and give holiday festivals in their honor regularly. If the Gods are happy they will give your kingdom bonuses, like extra resources or a bountiful harvest of food.

The game gets even more complicated when you have an especially large population. As culture and technology build in your kingdom, the more demanding the people’s needs are. They want better homes, accesses to more temples, a variety of food, schools etc. Homes will “devolve” if the people are not getting a specific need, like access to a doctor or recreations. When this happens, people will leave and the living capacity of your homes shrinks. This can cause massive unemployment if you do not watch this carefully. Can you tell that I’ve played this game a few times? I've been a bad pharaoh...

Another cool thing about this game is that you can build giant pyramids, the Sphinx and other great monuments. You will have to build a basic labor camp to recruit workers to work on these big projects, and make sure you have enough resources to build it. If your lands do not provide enough resources, you can always import them from other regions (at a cost of course).

If all this sounds interesting to you and want to learn more, go to the Pharaoh Heaven website. There you can get tips, see screenshots, get downloads and read stuff from their forums.

Audio and Video Impressions

The audio in Pharaoh is not that bad. It has background music that is appropriately Egyptian, but unfortunately is repetitive. You can hear the sounds of wildlife, people working, and if there is a conflict, battle sounds. It's entertaining, but if it's too much, you can turn the volume down on each type of sound that bothers you.

Video is very basic. The overall land and characters do look a bit cartoon-like, but that shouldn’t stop you from playing this game. The environment is basically a large area of land, with your building buttons and status reports along the side. The buttons have hieroglyphs, which is pretty cool.

Summary

Pharaoh is a fun but involving strategy, city-building game. Play in different eras of ancient Egypt; build massive pyramids, temples and other great monuments. Keep the people happy, or watch them leave your kingdom. Appease the Gods, or your crops may fail. Try your hand at the campaigns or missions. Will you succeed? Make your dynasty a memorable one. Let history speak of your name in reverence. Become the Pharaoh.