Pharaoh: A New Era Review – A Polished Gem

Coming straight from the golden age of pixelated city-builders, Pharaoh immersed players into the world of ancient Egypt as they took on the task of building a great city over 4,000 years of history. For many players, the original Pharaoh was a classic and was the introduction to city-builder games for many young gamers.

The classic Pharaoh was a solid city-building game, with great core mechanics and a strong sense of history permeating as you played. It had an exceptional sense of scale, especially when it came to building grandiose, resource-intensive monuments that made it stand out from other games at the time.

It was only a matter of time before Pharaoh got a remaster, but how does that remaster stand up?

Pharaoh: A New Era was developed by Triskell Interactive, a relatively small and unknown developer. Their other title, Lethis – Path of Progress is a city-builder in a similar vein to Pharaoh that went relatively unnoticed. It currently has mixed reviews on Steam, where it sits at a $20 price tag.

If nothing else, you can say that Triskell learned a lot from their game Lethis and applied the lessons they learned to remake Pharaoh. As the game is a remake, it is not a direct re-publishing of the classic with updated art: There is plenty new in the game and we have Triskell to thank for that.

The core of Pharaoh is and always was its campaign, which takes you over 4,000 years of rich Egyptian history and sees you building several cities along the great Nile river. This remains unchanged, but where Triskell really does the heavy lifting is in the new features added in the remake.

For starters, the user interface has been completely redone, along with all of the artwork. The new UI is not only sleek and stylish, it manages to provide more information than the original while taking up even less of the screen.

Navigating the new UI is refreshingly easy, taking away a lot of the guesswork in finding stuff that classic Pharaoh had. All types of buildings as well as a wealth of information overlays are available with just one or two clicks of the mouse, which really goes a long way when you’re building your city in real-time.

A number of new toggleable features now exist in the game’s menu, too, which you can switch on or off at any time as you play and dramatically alter your gameplay.

For example, classic Pharaoh featured a gameplay mechanic where Recruiters had to physically traverse your city and recruit workers. While immersive, this feature meant it took more time to gather workers, and often buildings far from your homes would receive fewer workers than more centralized or home-adjacent establishments.

One of the very welcome changes Triskell added to this remake was the ability to change the recruitment system to a global labor pool, so that any building can use a global volume of workers as opposed to having to manually recruit them. As stated above, this is totally optional and can be switched on or off at any time if you prefer a more classic Pharaoh experience.

New missions have also been adapted from the original game, adding some length to the game which runes about 50-60 hours to complete.

A new feature I imagine will have mixed reactions from fans is the changes to combat. Classic Pharaoh required you to manually respond to attacks from enemy forces by moving your troops to their location and fighting within your city. In Pharaoh: A New Era, this has been completely replaced by auto-resolving battles that happen outside of your city on a separate screen.

While this gives players the chance to focus more on city building uninterrupted, micro-managed combat is very popular in this genre, and switching to a completely auto-resolve system may be really offputting for a lot of players. I personally didn’t enjoy it, and while in the old system, a stray troop may slip past your attention and wreak havoc on your city, I greatly preferred it over this one.

What certainly cannot be argued is that Pharaoh: A New Era gives the classic game a beautiful facelift.

The original Pharaoh was made with pixel art, which was the industry standard in 1999. In A New Era, the art has been completely redone with what seems to be 2d art, with 3d models for the animated population in your cities.

The new art is beautiful and somehow manages to be visually distinct while still looking like the classic game. A ton of new animations have been added to the game, breathing life into the cities. It really feels like Pharaoh: A New Era is what the classic game would have been if not for technological limitations.

The game is a must-have for fans of the city-builder genre. This polished gem offers an old-school experience that just isn’t replicated anymore, with quality-of-life improvements that take all the cons from the classic and leave it with nothing but pros.

Pharaoh: A New Era is currently sitting on Steam at $22.99, with a -15% off sale putting the game at just $19 at the time of writing. With that price point and everything this game has to offer, it almost feels like a waste for any fan of city-builders to pass it up.

Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website! Pharaoh: A New Era is available on Steam and Gog.