Developer: Impressions Publisher: Sierra Studios
Reviewed by KaCee on 11/21/2000

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First Impressions:

After loving Caesar III by the same companies, I couldn't wait to start Pharaoh, another city-building game. I was excited by the prospect of this game actually allowing me to build the great monuments of Egypt. Learning this game was very easy since I was so familiar with the previous one, but the initial helping-hand scenarios should make it easy for anyone. It isn't just Caesar III with an Egyptian motif, however; there are different challenges, primarily how to get water to your citizens. In the Egyptian deserts in Pharaoh, you may only place wells and water holes where the land allows it. In C3, you could build reservoirs and aqueducts to take water anywhere you wished.

Once the game got going, many of the same strategies used in Caesar III translated well and I was enjoying myself. Eventually, though, the excitement of building pyramids, tombs, and other monuments wore thin. This is where Pharaoh eventually failed to please: the construction of monuments was so arduous and took so long that I tired of the game.

Although at many levels there is a choice of scenarios, the choice is not clear-cut between warfare and monument building. Because of this, even after I tired of monument building, there was no way to go through the game and avoid it completely. This is why this review has taken so long to complete: I kept getting bored with Pharaoh. Eventually I was only able to tolerate the long periods of doing almost nothing except ordering festivals while my computer ran the game because I took to doing handicrafts at the same time. It's rather incredible how much beading I've done while waiting for medium and large pyramids to be built. I'll discuss this and other problems further in the Gameplay section of the review.

I played Pharaoh on an Intel Pentium II 350MHz with a 15" SVGA monitor and sufficient memory for the full install (597MB, but there are standard and minimum settings as well). It ran fairly well, although large cities slow down the computer somewhat. There is a speed setting, but even on 100% a very large city played a bit slowly. Occasionally the game would crash for no reason and without even prompting a Windows error message. It would just stop. The online technical FAQ mentions that this can sometimes happen if you have any other programs running, such as those in the system tray.

Graphics:

Pharaoh's graphics are nice to look at, especially since I'm into ancient Egyptian designs and architecture. As with Caesar III, it would have been nice to be able to zoom in and out of the main area, but the only other view is the minimap. You can, however, rotate the view, which is crucial since some buildings hide behind taller ones. As with many games of this sort, the pictures shown on the game box are a bit misleading; while there are a few nice animated sequences between major scenarios, the rest of the game play is simply overlooking the city.

Like C3, Pharaoh has walkers. Most buildings send out an associated walker (i.e., a temple sends a priest, a market sends a distributor, etc.), and any building or home passed by a walker is considered to have access to that service. If you design your city poorly, the walkers will miss the important destinations and services will suffer even though you're paying for them.

One of the best new features in Pharaoh is the roadblock. By putting a roadblock on a road, most walkers will turn around and go back instead of wandering all around farms, down roads that exist merely to connect different areas of population, etc. The roadblocks allow much greater control of the walkers in terms of keeping some areas wealthy with access to better goods and services, and other areas middle class to maintain a high number of workers. Best of all, the roadblocks are not absolute, since walkers that have a legitimate reason to go elsewhere such as those transporting goods and food will ignore the roadblocks entirely.

Also similar to Caesar III, you can use graphic overlays on the main screen to determine which walkers service what area, such as where water is being carried, what areas have good access to entertainment, etc.

One fault I found with the graphics: sometimes people appeared to be floating in mid-air or walking through the landscape instead of on it. People standing on top of a partially constructed pyramid were slightly skewed to one side, so in the corner they were actually floating in the air. Soldiers, immigrants, and coyotes appeared at times to walk through sand dunes. This is a very minor complaint though, and didn't really affect the game much.

Sound/Music:

The sounds in Pharaoh are more nice touches than critical elements. Other than the occasional cry of alarm for a fire or invasion, you could play this game successfully with the sound turned off completely. When there is a fire or invasion, you get an alert pop-up anyway in most cases. Having said that, the music is rather nice, mostly tribal drum-type stuff or songs that sound very much like the style of Lisa Gerrard. The quips and comments of the people in the city can be amusing at times, if a bit heavy on the professional puns. For example, the dentist tells you the city has the brightest smile in all of Egypt, the teacher tells you the city earns top marks, and rather contrary to the period, the fire patroller will tell you "This city is cool."

The people tend to have accents in the Spanish-Latino-Middle Eastern range. I really have no idea if that's comparable to an Egyptian accent from modern day or any period.

Gameplay:

As in Caesar III, each scenario sets goals for you in terms of pleasing Pharaoh: culture, prosperity, and population. The difference is that instead of a goal of peace, Pharaoh has a monument goal. In early scenarios, there are no monuments to build. In later ones, however, there is almost always something to build, even in the more militaristic scenarios.

I found that all too often I'd have a smoothly running city with all of my goals fulfilled except for the monument. Satisfying the requirements for burial goods was usually easy enough over time, but actually building the monuments was all too often a hassle more than a game. Monuments require a variety of supplies such as limestone, sandstone, granite, mud bricks (made of clay and straw), and wood for scaffolding. In most scenarios, at least one of the ingredients you need for the required monument was not available in your location, meaning you must import it.

While I enjoyed the challenge of importing the goods at first, it soon became too much of a long wait. A large pyramid requires over 200 blocks of limestone, but traders will only bring you eight at a time and sometimes limit you to only a small number per year. Sometimes you can open trade routes with several places that bring the supplies you need, but this leads to another fault with the game: dock confusion.

If the traders are all coming in by land, there's less of a problem. But if they come by boat, you must build a dock. Fair enough, but only one boat can use a dock at a time. You learn quickly to keep storage areas near the dock to speed up loading and unloading of boats, otherwise you may find a dock worker pushing goods all the way around the city, which takes forever. However, even if you manage to get that system working at peak efficiency, some scenarios have so many water-based trade routes that the boats line up at your dock. Since there can only be two boats from any one trade route on your screen at a time, if they're sitting there lined up, it's going to impact how fast you can get the stuff you need.

The natural solution would seem to be to build more docks. However, this does not work. For some reason, multiple docks confuse the boats, and those that have finished buying and selling at one dock will line up at the next dock, often only to eventually discover they don't want anything else. This clogs up trade routes badly and seriously increases the time needed to build a monument.

Even if you do get the trading worked out, you still may have a long wait before you can even start some monuments. Special sandstone monuments require you to have huge amounts of sandstone before you can even begin. Since you must produce/import 200 blocks before work can even start, that means tying up over six storage yards with sandstone, using up that many more workers in an inefficient manner.

With limestone pyramids in particular, masons work inefficiently at carving the sloping walls. They follow each other in a line and only the first in the line stops to shape the stone. Sometimes the next in line will reach the next chisel point while the first is still working, but it's rare to have more than two masons actually working at a given time. Adding more masons to the labor does nothing to speed up this part of the process.

So the main element of Pharaoh that sets it apart from other city-building games actually turns out to be the game's most obnoxious element.

When it comes to the military, I found that there is poor control over boats and soldiers. It was often difficult to get soldiers to board transports, warships didn't behave as I told them, and you cannot control what individual members of a regiment do. Parts of the line will sit and do nothing as their brethren are hacked to bits. Also, in military-based scenarios, the challenges posed by invading armies tend to come very quickly (which can be good as a game play challenge), and then eventually stop. So if it's taking you forever to build the monument, in many scenarios the interesting bits of defending your city cease, adding to the drudgery of a long building session.

As for other game play elements, in very long scenarios my granaries would occasionally all stop working at the same time. They were not labor-starved, they were not cut off from the city in any way, and all would shut down at once.

I asked the forum about this, the docks, and a rumor that the Cleopatra add-on allows monuments to be sped up, and the only answers I received for the granary problem seem to have missed my statements that they are not cut off from labor. The only solution I discovered was to destroy them all and rebuild them, which means losing whatever food they had in them at the time. As for the other questions, no one really has a solution for the dock problem, and it seems that Cleopatra allows pyramids to be sped up by blessings from some gods.

Gods are important in Pharaoh. You must please them with temples, shrines, and festivals or they will hurt your city. If you keep them very pleased, however, they can really help your city, almost to the point of cheating. For example, the cat-headed goddess Bast will throw festivals for other gods and fill your bazaars and homes with goods. Ptah will fill storage yards with goods, which can be extremely profitable.

If you don't also keep Pharaoh happy, he will eventually send his army against you and destroy your city. Ways to displease Pharaoh include being in debt for too long, failing to meet requests, and having a poor reputation.

Unfortunately, the game has a bug in the Inuet scenario whereby even satisfying requirements won't please Pharaoh. Apparently it is possible to win with the bug unfixed, but it takes an insane amount of timing and work. There is a fix to the bug in the Enhancement Pack 2, but you must restart the game from the beginning in order for the fix to take effect. This is very sloppy, and indicates that the game was not thoroughly tested before release.

Enjoyment:

Although the city-building part itself is enjoyable, the bugs and the slow monuments drained the fun out of this game for me. I couldn't even enjoy most military challenges without having to worry about a monument. Perhaps the speed blessings in Cleopatra alleviate this problem, but I honestly don't feel like spending the money to find out at this point. I'll wait for Pharaoh II, if such a thing is even in the works, and hope that the producers provide a more polished, better-conceived game.

Multiplayer:

Pharaoh has no multiplayer capability, and it wouldn't really fit the game anyway. I don't even want to imagine how boring it would be to multiplay monument building. It would mean tying up two computers while the players sat and stared, doing little. Maybe they could play cards off to the side or something.

Overall Impression:

While Pharaoh has many of the good elements of Caesar III and some new challenges, the fact that it takes forever to do what should have been the most interesting part of the game is a downer. Add in the bugs with docks, granaries, and the Inuet scenario, and this game gives the impression that it needed more thought during the development and testing processes.

Marketing Efforts Towards Women:

As far as I know, this game is not really marketed towards a single gender. Technically Pharaoh is male, but you can play as a male or female and choose a name accordingly. Your "character," however, is incidental. You are referred to in non-gender-specific pronouns or as a family.

Walkers come in both male and female varieties, usually as would probably match that role in ancient Egyptian society.

The add-on pack, Cleopatra, may be trying to access more of a female market, but since I haven't played it I don't know if it actually adds anything in a gender sense.

Additional Links:

Official Site

Demo

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