Pharaoh: A New Era

After becoming familiar with its systems, Pharaoh offers tremendous city building flexibility and a plethora of challenges unseen in any other city builder. A New Era has introduced numerous quality of life features found in contemporary city building titles to an already solid classic. From sandbox to successive dynasties, with new options to tune the game to your playstyle introduced, Pharaoh: A New Era beyond satisfies.

I have always considered the original City Building series to be some of the best games in the genre, and A New Era elevates Pharoah to modern standards spectacularly well. You’ll come for the charming style and intricate building mechanics but stay for the sheer wealth of content available, allowing you to spend hours building the Egyptian city of your dreams. I hope to see remakes of the rest of the series in the future, or maybe even a brand new ancient civilization city builder.

Pharaoh: A New Era is a good remake. Indeed, an excellent remake, very faithful to the original title, so those who appreciated it then and wanted to replay it in a more modern guise should not hesitate to buy it. Of course, more could have been done in terms of additions and changes, but we imagine that if successful, something new will come. Meanwhile, enthusiasts and those who are looking for a long and engaging city builder have been satisfied.

In recent years we have had a large offer of city builders and, more generally, management, each with a well-defined perspective on the genre or with elements of novelty. In this context Pharaoh: a New Era makes the years he carries on his shoulders feel more than other franchises resurrected by Dotemu. However, it remains a very solid city builder on which Triskell Interactive has intelligently got its hands on to modernize the interface and simplify some mechanisms that were a little too 90s. The amount of content has something truly remarkable (in fact, the Cleopatra expansion is included) and will delight videogame nostalgics and archaeologists.

New visuals look great without completely ditching the distinctive style of the original Pharaoh, more fluent animations add to the positive experience, while the gameplay is still demanding and addictive. Overall, Pharaoh: A New Era lives up to expectations for remakes of classic games, but Triskell Interactive should have worked much harder on the interface, as its new version makes the game harder to enjoy.