In ancient times, there was a company called Sierra Entertainment that made really good games. Unfortunately, they were acquired by a company called CUC International. You could say…they were CUC-ed. CUC was bought and sold and renamed several times, as was Sierra, eventually winding up at Vivendi. CUC and Sierra and Vivendi became part of Vivendi’s merger with Activision, which became Activision-Blizzard. Unfortunately, Activision-Blizzard has never made a good game and never will and the ancient ways of making good games were lost…until now.
Pharaoh: A New Era
Developer: Triskell Interactive
Price: $22.99
Platform: PC
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
Pharaoh: A New Era is a 4K remake and reboot of the Pharaoh city building and management games from that long-lost Sierra era. As the name implies, you become an immortal god-ruler, a descendent of the gods themselves, leading the mortals to power and…stop that…stop that…NO YOU GODDAMNED IDIOTS…WAIT WHY IS THE CITY ON FIRE?! WHY DO YOU ALL HAVE MALARIA?! GODDAMMIT! I MEAN I AM A GOD SO ME DAMMIT! OH RA IS MAD?! I AM ALSO PRETTY MAD TOO!
The citizens of ancient Egypt are crying out for your divine leadership, so you will steer them through a scenario, campaign, and sandbox mode, trying to keep them from dying of what is, frankly, often their stupidity or your own stupidity. Where many city and colony management games are focused on individual buildings and citizens, Pharaoh zooms out a little more in perspective. You do have an incredible selection of buildings and structures to choose from and they all meet various needs.
However, your focus, once your basic city is established, is more about meeting those needs at a neighborhood or macro level. Your Egyptians need food and water, of course, so you need to build farms and wells, but then you need to build places for the farms to put their food once harvested, but then you need to put places for your citizens to buy food, and of course, if it takes the transportation network ages to get food from the warehouses to the bazaars, there won’t be any food to buy.
Of course, your citizens want other things as well. They want to live in nice places. They want to not die of terrible diseases. And listen to this Millennial libcuck shit, straight from the tutorial, “The best way to prevent crime is to keep your population happy with adequate food, health care, and jobs.” Try putting down the avocado toast and pulling yourself up by your sandal straps, ancient Egyptian Millennials! Talk about an entitlement mentality!
This system of interlocking needs and the realities of physical space in the game is where Pharaoh gets most of its tension as it is nearly impossible to balance out everyone’s wants and needs, which is when the Fun(™) begins. It may be worth bulldozing a housing block of poors to build a new shopping mall…err Bazaar and elevate property values (what’s hieroglyphics for “my property values”?), but then you wind up with an increase in crime or, it turns out, you actually don’t have enough goods for the rich Patrick Batemanteps you attracted to the neighborhood anyway. Alternatively, the poors may move into your scenic slums, increasing crowding there, resulting in more disease, which spreads everywhere. Or Bast gets mad and starts burning down everything.
Ah, yes, on top of the usual people management problems, you have divine management problems. The gods of Egypt are real and demand tribute. Specifically, from you. If you don’t have enough festivals or temples or shrines, they will get angry. This may result in decreased happiness overall, decreased happiness from massive fires everywhere, or decreased happiness from massive crop failures and starvation. Of course, the gods also feud amongst themselves, so kissing ass to one may piss off another one, and trying to placate them may upset a third. Stow the fedora, atheist, the gods are real and they are usually pissed.
Where I would caution newer folks is this: This is an older game without a lot of handholding, which is to say it hits you in the face with a shovel. There is a tutorial, but it also just kinda turns you loose to run your city after that. There’s very few “Hey sweetie, it would be just darling if you could maybe keep everyone from dying of malaria, click on the flashing STOP DYING OF MALARIA button” prompts. Bad things are basically always happening, but that is why it’s a lot of fun. It’s also not quite the gold Egyptology book that’s so entrancing, but there is a robust encyclopedia built in (because this was from an era where sometimes games at least tried to pretend to be educational), so you can nerd out about the history of Egypt. In other words, Pharaoh: A New Era is a lovely update of the old classic. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m dead of malaria again.
The Final Word
Build a pyramid to my greatness. Then figure out how to not die of malaria.
– MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good
