![]() I had to restart one of them twice before I figured out how to achieve what the game was looking for. I say “smooth-ish”, because while I was learning what the game was showing me, I didn’t exactly skate through these opening missions. The first several missions in the game serve as a nice onboarding to the primary mechanics of Pharoah, guiding the player through a smooth-ish learning process. If you are looking for top tier graphics, you’re playing the wrong game in the wrong genre. I mean, we’re talking about little cartoon Egyptian dudes carrying buckets across the screen this isn’t exactly Crysis. Pharoah: A new Era also looks great in 1080p. On my 27” monitor, I played at 60 FPS at 2560 x 1440, and found the game to look insanely crisp and clean. Not that anyone should worry about it if they can’t play Pharoah at 4K. I dipped over to Steam after playing the remake for several hours to check out the differences between the two versions, and was stunned to see that the original game was displaying the exact same building designs as the new version (just in a much, much lower resolution). If you have the setup for it, you can now play Pharoah in 4K, which is kind of insane when you realize how faithfully the hand-drawn graphics of the original game have been recreated. The most noticeable change is the visual overhaul the game has undergone. Luckily, you can always hold a festival to try to appease Osiris, who is the God/Manager of the Nile.ĭotemu has retained all of that for the remake, which is extremely faithful to the original game, while still showing a fair number of upgrades for modern players. A bad flood season can set a city back years, as disease and starvation can quickly set in when the crops fail. Farming is done to the rhythm of the flooding of the Nile river, which can be very fickle. The endgame often involved the building of fabulous monuments, which required a great deal of effort, manpower, and materials, involving not only meticulous planning from the player, but also a very stable city to support the workforce doing the building. It was up to the player to make the residential districts as attractive as possible if they wanted the population to stay (and then go to work at the various nearby job sites). In Pharoah, players would designate housing areas, and then it was up to NPCs to move into them and upgrade them, depending on whether they liked the area or not. ![]() While much of the road building and structure placement would seem familiar to players, there were some cool new-at-the-time mechanics that fans had to wrap their heads around. ![]() When the original Pharoah first hit the market, it showed off a number of new features that distinguished it from the rest of the market. I start every level with some very well-laid and deliberate plans, and by the time I limp across the finish line, I'm hollering "Why?" at my monitor and spending more time with the game paused than with time elapsing.Įven after 20+ years, Pharoah feels unique and challenging. That’s certainly the case with Pharoah: A New Era, a deeply charming remake of the 2000’s-era Sierra Studios-published genre classic. ![]() And I guess that’s kind of the point – cities get messy quickly, and even the best planning can’t hope to contend with explosive growth, economic decline, or sudden disaster. I sat there all night on some janky old Kinkos computer, slowly expanding out my metropolis, never quite able to plan out my little districts in a way that would hold up as the city expanded. I myself was first hypnotized when a buddy showed me SimCity late one night at a Kinkos where I was hanging out while he worked an overnight shift. I’ve always had a soft spot for the city-building genre. I didn’t realize how much people wanted information on city-builders until I started posting videos of me playing a few upcoming titles on my little YouTube channel, and immediately saw that those videos got 100x the views of videos of me playing “normal”, “popular” games. Sure, games like FrostPunk occasionally break through to get a bit of attention, but for every one of those titles, there are ten that fly under the radar. These games sometimes go unnoticed by the mainstream, but audience is huge, and somewhat under-served by the modern gaming media. The continuing popularity of city-builder games never fails to surprise me.
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