Fun... until it completely breaks [bonus: see end of post for a MORE COMPREHENSIVE set of changes from the original. Many points I have not seen made elsewhere!]

I love Pharoah. It is basically the only game I play. Every couple of years I'll get the itch, and spent a week or two playing, until I've worked through the whole game (and the Cleopatra expansion)

So, obviously, I was excited for the re-skin!

Overall it is good. A few small weird things here and there that end up getting resolved by restarting the game, or deleting a building and rebuilding it. Small things. One of my docks was made unususable because of a "ghost ship," it was at the port that only sold limestone. It put in an order of limestone... and then sat there forever. Nobody else could use the dock. Eventually I deleted the dock, re-built it one square over, and things started working again... with the ghost ship just hanging out, until the level completed.

Just. Weird things like that. Annoying. But tolerable.

Until Rostja.

Regularly building on my pyramids would just stop, because even though nothing had changed, even though my stonemasons guilds were completely staffed, they just... stopped going. I was able to fix it temporarily by deleting the guilds, re-building them in a different spot, or re-starting the game. But it would happen again!

UNTIL... I saved the game, over-writing the most recent autosave, exited, then came back and tried to enter campaign mode... and got a "something's wrong with the save file!" message. Ok, ok, no need to panic, I'll just pick a different Rostja save file manually. Went to the previous save file. Same message. For that, and all others.

WHAT HAPPENED TO MY AUTOSAVE. WHAT HAPPENED TO MY CAMPAIGN. I have no idea why or how, but apparently my game is just corrupted now? Why? What happened?

Oh, and to top it all off, I think I was going to have to delete and re-start my smaller pyramid, because it seems that if it's tall enough to go off the page, the game does not want to actually complete the pyramid? That is my guess, anyway, and it is unrelated to the other build-stop-errors I mentioned earlier (where the pyramid was each time perfectly fitting all on screen)

So. Can't recommend right now. I hope the developers address the bugs that exist which, unfortunately, make the game unplayable. Something you couldn't do back in 1999, where if the discs were borked, your game was borked. Now, thanks to the power of the information superhighway, devs can put out broken builds, and let us do the testing :)

Developers, if you read this, feel free to get in contact with me, I'm happy to try to help identify bugs more precisely, if you tell me how.

-----------------------------------
CHANGES TO THE ORIGINAL
-----------------------------------

Also, because I have seen lists of changes, and thought, "wait, this didn't include X...," here's a more comprehensive (but surely incomplete) list of changes, as I remember it. My memory may be wrong, feel free to comment if I'm incorrect on anything

- MAJOR: why is no one talking about this? Houses no longer "consume" beer/pottery/linen/etc
(houses now have consumable goods, food, and "house" level goods, beer/pottery/linen/luxury. Once a house has pottery, it has pottery, you don't need to provide it again. If the house downgrades for some reason, perhaps your temple collapses? I don't know if it "loses" its higher-evolved-level goods and will need them again as it evolves, or if it keeps them. THIS MAJORLY CHANGES THE DYNAMIC OF THE GAME)

- Game does not pause while scrolling
(previously, putting your cursor at the edge of the map paused the game)

- Monuments must connect to the kingdom road
(no more plopping a pyramid in the middle of a desert. You must link it to a road. THIS HAS BUGS. Sometimes, despite having the road fine and connected, work will not start because they for some reason believe the road isn't there. Deleting the monument and placing it in the exact spot again works to fix this.)

- Police, magistrates no longer kill dangerous animals
(no more having a police-riddled slum near rocks, to fight off the scorpions)

- There's no point in having an item available for trade at multiple docks
(If Dock 1 trades in Pottery, ALL boats who trade in pottery will stop there for pottery, and nowhere else. If you have a storage yard for pottery at a later dock, don't bother, nobody will buy pottery there, they did all their trading for it at the first dock. I actually like this change, it makes managing imports/exports easier. Yes, ships will stop at multiple docks. If Dock 1 has Pottery trading On, Beer trading Off, and Dock 2 has Pottery and Beer both On, a ship which purchases both will buy pottery from Dock 1, Beer from Dock 2)

- You can see the points in ingress/egress from a building, both when building and later
(this is nice!)

- Flood plains are spec'd different?
(the edges I swear are off. Spots that look like should fit a farm, do not; the edges are 1-square more sensitive. You can fit fewer farms into the flood plain)

- You can no longer see what Bazaar workers are carrying
(in the original game, you could click the workers as they returned to the bazaar, to see what goods they had purchased. You can still click them, but it won't show what they are carrying)

- Some kind of upgrade to soldier's equipment?
(the forts mention being able to fashion compound bows from wood for the archers, and shields from antalope hides for the infantry. My game broke before this ever became workable gameplay for me)

- Ptah respects your "fill up to X% of yard"
(this may have existed in the original? If you have a yard that is 1/4 pottery, with rules saying "allow up to 1/4 pottery," and is otherwise empty, and Ptah selects it for the "fill a storage yard with excess capacity" blessing? You get no additional pottery, it remains 1/4 filled.

- You can no longer partially fulfill burial provisions
(let's say a pyramid needed 800 pieces of wood. Preciously you could do this in batches, a few pieces at a time. Now fulfilling burial provisions is all or nothing)

- There is no longer a general "Risks" overlay
(only specific overlays)

- No "randomly generate an egyption name" option when creating your family line

- No videos in between dynastic stages
(it's all just one long game of lots of many games; I liked the way that divided the eras)


- The changes to war
(others have commented on this, so I won't bother. I cannot tell if Transport warfs are still necessary, because my game BROKE. They were not necessary on the levels I played)

- The changes to the interface
(again, other people have commented on this)

I've lost interest.

There's a lot of good and bad in the game, but I feel the bad currently outweighs the good:

THE GOOD:
- The maps are lush and pretty, and the art style is vibrant. The characters look a bit goofy, but the animations are nice and I like the voice acting. That said, this is the bare minimum I'd expect for a remake of a 20+ year old game. I'd expect the graphics to be high definition and clear, and they are. Well done.
- Generally, it's faithful to the original game when it comes to gameplay. You still have the same buildings, same general direction, and a person who played the original game will find it relatively easy to play the remake. There's some QOL changes (roadblocks, global labour pool) that greatly improved upon the game, but are not new to other games by the original developers (Zeus, for instance).
- The new soundtrack is nice. It's pleasant while playing, and I haven't had the impulse to turn it off or mute it at all.
- The option screen is much more fulsome, and there's plenty of, well, options to tweak things. My favorite is the ability to make it so certain buildings don't automatically accept all goods by default. That makes tweaking buildings like bazaars and whatnot to my liking mid-game.
- I do appreciate the extended campaign and the renaming of the levels.

THE BAD:
- Others have said it, but so, so, so many bugs. This is what ultimately led me to lose interest in playing the game after a while. After the first few campaigns I started to notice numerous issues that would pop-up, such as with immigration, trade, and pyramids not being able to be built if part of them are off screen. For the amount of time this game was in development, I would've expected it to be thoroughly bug tested, but it doesn't feel like it. The original games went through lengthy alpha and beta testing periods. This feels like an early access game marketed as a finished product.
- There's a lot of content missing or messed up. The labels on the world map are congested and hard to follow. There's plenty of text that hasn't been put in yet, and instead just references to code. The reference book is plagued with errors and incomplete; the documentation feels very simple and would be hard for a new player to the game (or its original) to find information on basic game mechanics. The graphs are all missing labels. The lack of content gives the feeling that the game was rushed for release.
- This is an aesthetic issue, but I think a fair one: the font and symbols used for the game are generic. The original game's font was also somewhat of a pain to read at times, but in this case there's just nothing not generic about the text or symbols used. I heard someone once refer to the symbols as "generic corporate icons" and the font as "the type you'd find on a boring essay" and that is true for this remake, too.
- There's still a lot missing from the original game which inexplicably hasn't been included. No minimap. No ability to rotate the map. The option to zoom out and in are limited, so it's easy to miss resources on the sides of the map because the UI is blocking part of them. There's no cutscenes, or immersive messaging in the game outside of a narrator reading the opening objectives for each map. The workers pulling sleds for monuments is gone. These are just a few of the things I noticed. As a result, doing map after map starts to feel a little boring since there's little to make you feel particularly excited. And when you know that the map coming up may be broken, why bother?
- Pathfinding needs improvement. Others have mentioned how trade ships only go to one dock, but I've also noticed how traders in general have issues getting around your city. Some workers don't choose the best route to get to the building they're needing to get to. While it's nice to be able to see the spawn and despawn points for walkers, it would be nice to be able to change them, too.
- There's numerous graphic glitches which, honestly, could have been fixed before the game launched had there been a thorough testing of the game, but, well, it doesn't seem like it was thoroughly tested. This is especially true for walkers that go through gates, for instance.
- While the new soundtrack is good, the city is otherwise lifeless as far as sounds go, which is odd for this game. The original game, and others like it, gave you ambience for the city, with different buildings giving you a different sound if you zoomed or focused on them. There's nothing like that in this remake.
- Defensive structures are redundant, and the military system feels like an afterthought. I personally didn't care for the original game's military system - it was quite buggy - but the current system in this game just feels like an add-on later in the game's development. It's just a screen that pops up, you click a button, and lo' you've either won or lost a battle. You have no way to determine strategy, or to affect the battle in any way even with this simplified system. It just seems to come down to, mostly, whether you have more soldiers than the other guy, and any military strategist will tell you that most battles aren't won just by numbers. The change in the system from the original game has also made defensive structures worthless or less useful (ie. walls don't do anything so why build them?). It's also impacted predators, because they just go on killing because there's no soldiers to kill them. Did the developers not think to use the policemen instead? It's the latter part that gets me. Something like that would've been easily discovered if the developers did a beta test of the game ahead of time, but now the game suffers post-release because something as simple as "hmm, maybe we should have a way to kill the predators" wasn't addressed ahead of time. So, then, why would players even have the option to turn predators on?
- My biggest gripe with the game, as it is right now, is that there's often no indication from the game if you've done something wrong, or correct, or that there's a problem. You get tons of notifications, but they don't actually explain how you could fix things. Your overseers often only give you vague ideas what to do, and not catered to your current situations - the suggestions seem generic, no matter what your game is like. After the first few maps, the learning curve of the game goes up so much that you can easily lose a map because you don't know what to do and haven't been given any guidance. I'm not expecting nor would I want the game to hold my hand, but I would expect it to tell you what you did that is wrong and how you might fix it. I'd also expect the game to give better direction, and clarity on what you need to build monuments, advice on where to put certain buildings, and so on. But there's just nothing of the sort here, and that can be a problem...
- ...because one of the major issues this game has is that you can fail some missions without even knowing you've failed them. There are some missions where if you fail to accept some materials from a neighboring town early on, they will cut off trade and there's no way to get that trade route back. Unfortunately, later in the same mission, you will find out that you needed that trade route to beat the map. So, you will have wasted possibly hours on a mission that was already unbeatable early on, but the game never tells you. The game doesn't allow you to fix these types of innocent 'mistakes'. There is no way to beat the mission but to cheat or try again, and honestly, why would you try again? What a waste of your time because of something that was not at all your fault because you didn't know it was a problem? God, it's so utterly frustrating to lose a mission this way, and all because this game suffers from a lack of telling you what's going on and giving you user specific information that might help you.

All of this just doesn't make me want to play the game anymore.

The Pharoah remaster has been getting a lot of hate for its changes and glitches, but most of these the issues have been overblown and the remaster overall is actually a very good improvement gameplay wise. Most of the gameplay changes are meaningful mechanical improvements to the original games problem areas like its military system and pretty much nothing regarding the actual gameplay has been made worse. Although the game is glitchy, it is not as bad as people have been saying and much of it has just been people not understanding mechanics. The actual major problem with this game is with its artistic changes.

Most of the changes made to the game have been made to improve the gameplay and the developers have succeeded in this regard. The broken and buggy military system of the original game has been replaced with a more hands-off system that makes combat more about just developing a good military-industrial complex. Exploiting the AI’s bad deployment or breaking them with walls, bridges and bottlenecks is not really an option anymore. Maps like the Dunqul Oasis and Rowarty will demand one hoard savings over the course of an era to be able to rapidly build a military-industrial complex for a massive rush. Military missions become death matches instead of just the AI showing up and leaving after landing on the wrong island or being blocked off from an island by buildings. Sometimes more is less and this new simpler military system adds a lot more depth to the game. Other minor changes include visual changes to flood plains that make it easy to know which lands are fertile, a streamlined UI, a good tutorial that is not chaotic & buggy, customizable key binds, a nilometer to better plan for floods, and more options in the settings to customize one’s experience like the ability to disable the employers needing to walk to housing mechanic.

Unfortunately, this game was buggy on release, but most issues complained about on the Steam forum have been people simply not understanding the game. People were unable to construct pyramids, but they simply did not know that they needed to build a carpenter and give them wood to construct ramps for the pyramid. They did not know that their workforce ages out of being workers and that stone masonrys are the first places to lose their labor. People struggled with workers not coming to their settlement, but their city sentiment was too low because of high taxes and low wages. Some just did not know that they needed burial provisions for their pyramids to win missions. Other major issues like farmers not going out to the floodplains to work or carry stones up the pyramid could be resolved by just reloading an autosave. Most issues were not serious issues, but there were serious issues with the game. It was just not as terrible as people would have you believe due to misunderstandings. The games campaign was completely beatable on release on its hardest settings, and one could put in well over a hundred hours with only a couple annoying glitches slowing progress. The game is definitely less buggy than the original and most of the bugs in this remaster are from the original.

The biggest issue with this game is its graphics and artistic changes. Overall, everything looks great. Most of the building redesigns are good, and the game even has more UI art, screen art and even an opening cinematic that literally looks right out of the Prince of Egypt film. However, a lot of little details were lost. Instead of five-man teams pulling stones to the pyramid and up the scaffolding its just one guy pulling bricks up one at a time and disappearing as they reach the higher parts of the pyramid. The people carrying stuff to the tombs in the valley do not have their own unique sprites. Land caravan traders will only ever have one mule in their caravan regardless of how much they are carrying. The flood plains change works well mechanically, but it was more enjoyable to transform the old games weed filled floodplains into productive farmlands. Bridges are just planks of wood no matter how long the bridge is which means boats just phasing through bridges instead of having a way to pass under them. Obelisk construction scaffolding is less interesting, and obelisks look less interesting as their writing is not visible until construction is finished. People no longer not dance at the festival squares. There are quite a few minor issues like this, but they add up and were a lot of what made these Impression Game’s city builders special.

This is a great remaster, but it has tradeoffs. Its much better gameplay wise and will probably be even better as the devs patch up some of the glitches as they have been doing. However, a lot of the little things that made the old game extra special were lost with the HD update.

Remaking games and having it live up to the original in every way is hard for many different reasons, including being very divisive especially for fans of the source material. A lot of other reviewers make it seem like this game is already perfect for new comers and nostalgia enjoyers alike, or that it exists for no other reason than to figuratively assault their childhood but I'm here to tell you it's not worthy of such extremes. I was more than ready to love this game but it's not ready to handle taking the relationship to the next level.
Having extensively played the original (a wonderful, also imperfect game, but for mostly different reasons) and many city-simulator games like it since I was a child, I can't recommend this remake in it's current state. Far too many issues detract from an already uneven experience. Don't reward them for the state of this game by buying it now. It was clearly rushed out the door for a deadline even though it has been worked on for quite some time and it is clear why they did not allow any sort of early hands-on experiences to anyone; the opening hours of the game do not hold up to almost any amount of scrutiny.

Cons
-UI is inferior in many ways compared to the original both functionally and stylistically. Removal of the minimap is a prime example of this.
-The gutting of the military system is questionable, not to say the original was great, but their implementation looks rushed and has several issues (multiple battles in a row? no clear victor in the actual battle screen, you have to hit continue or they just kind of dance at each other)
-Advisors report issues that defy reality. When you do what they tell you, it either doesn't change what they report or switches to another issue that also cannot be correct. Yet these "phantom" issues will seemingly stop the game from playing normally.
e.g. High taxes prevent immigration - is that so? even at a 0% tax rate? :)))))))

-Dozens of balancing, graphical and gameplay issues in the 6 hours I've played - too many to bother listing

Pros
-Works on modern systems and resolutions, runs well enough, new graphics are fine but are more cartoon-style than the more realistic take of the original
-Nice QoL toggle options and many small but nice tweaks - I'll thank whatever Egyptian god would hear me for the inclusion of the Global Labor Pool, the "FROM - TO" destination icons on individual workers and the ability to zoom in and out with a scroll wheel FINALLY
-I love the "flat" display mode, great for building and I think it works better than the rotate option they did away with even if it was nice to look at your city from different angles
-Tutorial is nice, if uneven and prone to breaking, and introduces some advanced concepts that the original never bothered explaining
-City sounds, general ambiance and the narration are copied from the source material from what I can tell. This is a great thing aside from them not remastering the narrator tracks leading to him being as "compressed" as he was in the original.
-The soundtrack is essentially a rearrangement of the original score. It certainly captures what I might imagine ancient Egypt sounded like roughly as well as the original did. The new score is serviceable though I still prefer most versions from the original but, hey, that may be down to my own nostalgia bias

Weird
-Strange balancing of certain industries (one reed gatherer supplies six papyrus makers and still generates excess, compared to a 3:4 ratio of clay pits to potters, per their tutorial)
-A house wants to upclass but does not have enough room. Okay, give some space and guess what? When it does expand, it will never properly fill those vacancies.
-Poor communication of what certain UI elements/graphs do or explain and by extension, a near total abandonment of the charming hieroglyphics system the original used
-Ever want to watch cartoon people get killed over and over by alligators and hippos? Watch your dreams come true in A New Era; animals have themselves a good old time at the expense of your city and its people because you can't actually control your soldiers to hunt them down. The silly dev must have known people would get tired of hearing the same death sounds hundreds of times because you're but one toggle away from stopping an endless cycle of killing. But in an even more odd twist, the constables and their now cosmetic whips can't fight them either. Why is that?

The devs of this game have two other smaller indie games to their credit, one that draws heavily from the original "Pharaoh + Cleopatra" that A New Era is based on, so it's likely they loved Pharaoh and the rest of the "Impressions Games" collection as much as many of us do. Their game also had many issues at launch but did get better with time. This game will also get better with patches, I'm sure. Don't buy it yet.

Got the game out of nostalgia, but aside from "better graphics" there is not much improvement offered. Cannot rotate map view and devs say its design decision and it would be too hard to add now. Lack of mini-map. Multiple small but annoying issues (miss-alignments, sometimes textures blinking (i noticed especially hipos and flags in the map), mediocre music, robotic animations). Hyped for almost 2 years, got buggy and a bit poor quality game.

To summarize: a bit of disappointment. It made me download and just start replaying the old original game.

Hey,

I went back and wanted to do a re-review. Pity I can't keep the old so you have a reference. Basically game went out superunpolished, many bugs, lacking original functionallity. In Beta.

Now it is far more consistent and tons of QoL improvements (map design, scrolling, dunno moving around the game and menus and the options is just very very nice now). Also it doesn't break that often (city sentiment overreacting, gods throwing money 24/7) and it is very well responsive.

Still some cons in this playthrough.

1. Difficulty. There is no challenging difficulty. In hard it is just very easy. I honestly thought I was playing on easy. Once you set up the trade is a breeze. Also it was funny to see 20 prosperity with 100k in the bank. I know it is related to house lvls but come on, say it in the overseer.
2. Broken stats. I just tested a military map (the one you have 2 forts starting) and left the city for 6 years. Without doing anything from the start. Thousands of plagues, enemy's destroying the city, lack of workers, no food. Oh well the city still "idiolize me like a god" and people still wanted to come despite tons of diseases. And the gods where fine :)
3. Lack of balancing in some maps. You easily get everything you need for your economy but the goal is 4k habitants so you basically need 1000 police stations to keep unemployment low :). Or why I choose all the time the one mission that has less buildings: NOTHING to do if you rely on imports. Just waiting for the import cap each year and pray the pharaoh gives me something. I feel there's no effort in creating a new campaing that fits the new reality. Doesn't make sense to just copypaste the old designs and not give new maps or stuff.
4. I would love to have custom maps more accessible through steam. As a TF2 random maps enjoyer, usually the community is what pushes forward the creativity. So at least make it easy to get them through steam.
5. The thing I hate THE MOST BY FAR. is to not have a "silent" mode. Like wtf listening to a "clink" every 10 seconds because I have 2% of unemployment. COME ON. It's great you can now avoid getting the fullscreen, but man.
6. Some poor details. Still I can hear the hunters' arrows from everywhere. If you let the "battles" play on it glitches and you basically listen to arrows indefinitely until you click off the battle. Also what you see and the "numbers" are unmatched.
7. Some strange features like only having an entry point to a building (so if you connect 2 different roads to something, only one works as entry), 0 feedback on why a city buys everything from trade and some others don't?.
8.PLEASE TELL ME WHAT DO I NEED TO BUILD THE MONUMENTS AT THE BEGINNING. Not AFTER I already worked the ground for many years for gods sake. I need to plan ahead


It's unthinkable to play the old one (it was too buggy) but this one still feels like the bare minimum has been done. This one is enjoyable but still the frustrating parts (sound design was better in the original and "yeah spend 25 in game years just doing festivals") are not even tried to solve.

Despite all that I can recommend it now. They gave us the tools to not rely on them anymore, but still some fixes can make this game my favourite to play again.

A nice remake of old Impression's pharaoh and Cleopatra games, but blasphemed by some mobile game liked changes. If you are a lover of old pharaoh games, you might be unhappy with the following
1) The art style of characters are becoming cartoonish.
2) The military system is totally reworked in a very shallow way. You can no longer control your soldiers to actually battle the enemy. Instead you need to wait the outcome of the auto-battle that seems only related to your troop numbers. This renders defence buildings almost useless.

But except that, if you never played impression city builders before, this game can you experience the charm of the golden period of old city builders on modern hardware. Jut this makes the game deserve the thumb-up.

My copy of the original finally stopped working properly with my computer this past year so this remake was conveniently timed, however it is not 1:1 in terms of gameplay. War is now a numbers game rather than a realtime event on the map. As long as you have full forts you'll probably win. As well, the commerce tools are glitched and do not work if you let your overseers decide export and import rates. For example if you want to export all surplus goods, you have to set it to specifically export over 0. Commerce is how you make money in this game so that feature being broken is unfortunate. By far the worst thing is you automatically lose if you get to -5k deben. In the original you simply could not buy anything else and had to trade and tax your way out of the hole to make a comeback.

I need my regular dose of this game regardless so I have played about 50 hours and taken these changes as an extra challenge - I'm done with the first two eras. However a significant chunk of that time must be from simply waiting for monuments to finish building for eons after I have completed the other goals, racked up enormous amounts of deben, upgraded all the living conditions as much as possible, paid my citizens 20db over the minimum wage, and gotten up to make a sandwich. The pacing is off.

I do recommend trying it, but I am using a thumbs down so the developers read my comments about the glitches.

As someone who spent their young years playing the original Sierra/Impressions games for hundreds of hours, I feel that this remake is top notch. There is literally one thing that did not match my expectations, which is the visual style of the game, but I quickly got used to this new style. The only changes that were made to the original gameplay are changes for better - many quality of life changes that I truly appreciate.
Some players complain about the simplification of the military aspect, but in my opinion the new, simplified approach is much, much better. Who doesn't remember the military issues and awkward control of the battles? In Pharaoh: New Era you can simply forget about constant loading saves and just focus on the main focus of the game, which is city building.
And, most importantly, the devs actually listen to the players' feedback and with each patch the players' needs are met, step by step.
Bugs? Yes, there have been some, but not game breaking (at least not yet for me - with over 150 hours so far.
Summing up - definitely worth a try.

A New Era is the remaster of the original Pharaoh released in 1999. It's a charming old school city builder with 2D isometric visuals and roads at straight angles. It can't compete with deeper games such as Cities Skyline or Frostpunk, but it plays its hand well: the Egyptian theme is very well developped.

Towering monuments can be built using inordinate amounts of time, material and manpower. There's a pantheon of five gods (Osiris, Ra, Seth, Bast and Ptah) to worship by building temples and running religious festivals. Like in real life the Nile is the key to prosperity. Wells and clay pits require to be dug near water. Farms need to be built on flood plains or irrigated by ditches linked to a water lift pumping from the river. People and goods can be ferried from one bank to the other. Ships from distant cities stop at your docks to trade.

The remaster blows some dust off the original game by introducing a range of quality-of-life tweaks: an unlimited zoom out, building copypasting, and new gameplay toggles like the global worker pool and the fixed worker-to-inhabitant ratio instead of the ageing system.

Since the game is cute and bloodless I've played it with my 5 year old. He loves backseating and watching the city's hustle and bustle: priests in full regalia wandering the streets, hunters shooting arrows at ostriches, carriers delivering huge stone blocks to pyramid construction sites... It's good and healthy fun.