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Pharaoh is a strategic city-building game set in Egypt, from
roughly 2900 to 700 BC. Grow Egyptian villages into thriving
metropolises and watch the economy and inhabitants of this exotic
land come to life. Interact with the citizens. Observe their
culture and habits. Raise their hopes or raze their homes. Manage
your city poorly and watch it burn, be pillaged, or collapse in
economic ruin. Manage it well, and ultimately, the greatest
Egyptian structures will be built in your honor. Your rule will
span generations until your dynasty, your royal bloodline,
produces a Pharaoh! Pharaoh includes many features never before
seen in a city-building series game, including a farming model
based on the flooding of the Nile, naval warfare, giant monuments
assembled over time, a unique dynastic progression, and variable
difficulty levels. It uses 16-bit color graphics, large s for
seamless game play, and a proven interface.
Review
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Pharaoh takes Impressions' popular Caesar III, relocates it to
ancient Egypt, and adds a few welcome features. Like Caesar III,
Pharaoh's gameplay falls somewhere between the intensive
city-management of Maxis' SimCity series and the combination of
city management and combat found in Blue Byte's Settlers games.
However, Pharaoh is neither a sequel nor an expansion to Caesar
III; although many of the game mechanics are identical to its
predecessor, the strategy is noticeably different in order to
suit Pharaoh to its setting. Pharaoh is an all-around better game
than Caesar III, and while it may seem overly familiar to fans of
that game, it offers enough variety and innovation to keep things
interesting.
The game begins simply, requiring you to create jobs and homes to
attract settlers. Once your population begins growing, you must
make sure it has food and water, access to religious facilities,
entertainment, and other luxuries to attract a larger and more
affluent populace. You must also ensure that your people are
protected by a suitably strong militia.
Accomplishing these goals is a complex process. Most goods
require natural resources in order to be produced, and many of
these resources must be imported. Many of the goods must be
imported as well, and you must manage the distribution of these
items to make sure everyone is getting enough of what they need
to survive and what they want to live happily. Imports can be
pricey, so you must also produce items for export.
Unlike in SimCity, management of your city in Pharaoh is a very
hands-on experience. With the sole exception of housing, which
will upgrade itself based on nearby services, you decide exactly
what type of building will be placed where. Storehouses and
industrial buildings must be close enough to residences that
goods will be easily accessible, but not so close that they lower
property value. The same principle applies to markets, which
distribute food and luxury items to your people. Those who found
themselves frustrated by the inability to manage market workers'
distribution routes in Caesar III will be glad to know that a
roadblock option has been included in Pharaoh, giving you some
control over where patrolling workers will walk. It's not a
perfect solution - strict management over their routes would
still be welcome - but it certainly helps.
The ancient Egyptian setting of the game leads to some other
interesting new features. The regular flooding of the Nile River
demands you produce or import enough food to last through the
flood season. A poor inundation can lead to bad irrigation and
food shortages, so satisfying the god of the flood, Osiris,
becomes a top priority. The religion system in Pharaoh has also
been improved since Caesar III. Satisfying the gods is now a
higher priority, but there are fewer gods to deal with in each
scenario, thereby making the process slightly less involved.
The primary play mode of Pharaoh is the "family" mode. You
control a ruling family who must govern a series of cities, each
time taking on more responsibility and earning more respect. The
mission-based nature of this mode is interesting; instead of
being a simple open-ended management simulation like SimCity, in
Pharaoh you have very specific goals, but these can take a long
time to achieve. New options and features are introduced at a
rate that keeps things interesting, and the end result is a game
with a great deal of longevity. Those who prefer a more
open-ended simulation will want to play the game's "sandbox"
mode, which lets you build and govern without the constraints of
the scenario objectives.
Pharaoh's missions are also more involving than those in Caesar
III. Combat is still a secondary element, but it is easy to
control and never really becomes the focus. In most missions,
you're required to build monuments, and these get larger and more
costly as you progress. Not only does this provide a bit of
tangible success to each scenario - seeing a huge pyramid
completed is far more satisfying than reaching some arbitrary
numerical rating - but the monuments also add some visual
excitement to a game that otherwise looks like Caesar III with an
Egyptian flavor. That's not to say it looks bad; the landscape
graphics may be somewhat bland, but the building graphics and
animations are detailed and appealing.
Pharaoh is only subtly different from its predecessor, but its
new elements make it much deeper and more satisfying. Like Caesar
III, Pharaoh takes ideas from other games and combines them in a
way that is different and entertaining. Unlike Caesar III, the
frustrations that accompany some of the game's mechanics are
easily dealt with. Pharaoh is slow-paced but addictive and is
immensely complex but incredibly easy to play. --Ron Dulin
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