Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Where, oh where to begin? I dug Caesar III to the point where it caused me to lose sleep and affect my health. Being a huge fan of Egyptian history, I was salivating for months while Impressions developed Pharaoh.
I was not disappointed. The graphics, while not your latest 3D-Accelerated Zing-Boom flavor, are slick and very nice to look at. The gameplay is all we remember from the Citybuilding series, plus a bunch of new surprises. There are many differences in the way you build a Roman city vs. an Egyptian city, and it's refreshing to see that Pharaoh goes for accuracy in the little details. This is a detail-oriented game, after all. Floodplain farming, the lack of groundwater in the desert and monument building are some of the interesting differences between Pharaoh and Caesar III. Management of religion is improved somewhat, though I still find myself constructing "temple row" somewhere out of the way just to make sure all the gods are equally appeased.
The biggest stumbling block, ironically, is also Pharaoh's greatest triumph: the accurate and detailed process it takes to build monuments. You don't just say "Oh, I wanna build a pyramid" and plunk it down. No, first you must build the infrastructure; guilds must cut and lay stone, peasants must prepare the build site and haul stone. Carpenters must build ramps, etc etc. The process of building a pyramid is excellent, and most fun to watch... when it goes as planned.
Unfortunately, the damn things take FOREVER to build! You may have met all your victory requirements for a given mission four hours previous, but you're stuck waiting for that Pyramid to build. Sometimes carpenters just don't come build the ramps, and your stone haulers are left stacked up waiting to deposit their loads (that stuff gets heavy after a few months!).
Game lengths aside, Pharaoh is as fun and addicting as any strategy game I've played, and the city-building style is always a refreshing change from the "Gather>Build Units>Destroy Enemy" formula that most RTS games employ. In Pharaoh, if you don't make your city work, or plan, or listen to your people, you'll be one unhappy city manager.
This game rocks
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