Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6080 in Video Games
• Brand: Vivendi Universal
• Model: 70831
• ESRB Rating: Everyone
• Platforms: Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows 95
• Format: CD-ROM

Amazon.com Review
If building and managing cities is your passion, then Pharaoh is the game for you. It puts you in charge of building the ancient Egyptian civilization, complete with work camps, temples to Bast, and, of course, pyramids.

Unlike some games of this type, where you build one city indefinitely and watch the population climb, Pharaoh is divided into missions. Players are given a goal--a desired population, food storage targets, and cultural achievements. Play continues until the target is met, unless the city succumbs to plagues, debt, or outside invaders first.

Pharaoh is loads of fun. The mission goals are tough but attainable, and city building for a finite time span will appeal to players who find unending development a bore. The usual juggling of civic needs for water, food, entertainment, and jobs is well balanced. The range of industries, religious practices, and municipal services is engaging, and the graphics are clear enough that it is easy to tell what's going on in the city. The mission-by-mission format allows the game to present a few challenges at a time, providing novelties for new levels of play.

Take charge of the Nile Valley and become a legend! --Alyx Dellamonica

Amazon.com Product Description
Pharaoh is a strategic city-building game set in Egypt, from roughly 2900 to 700 BC. Grow Egyptian villages into thriving metropolises and watch the economy and inhabitants of this exotic land come to life. Interact with the citizens. Observe their culture and habits. Raise their hopes or raze their homes. Manage your city poorly and watch it burn, be pillaged, or collapse in economic ruin. Manage it well, and ultimately, the greatest Egyptian structures will be built in your honor. Your rule will span generations until your dynasty, your royal bloodline, produces a Pharaoh! Pharaoh includes many features never before seen in a city-building series game, including a farming model based on the flooding of the Nile, naval warfare, giant monuments assembled over time, a unique dynastic progression, and variable difficulty levels. It uses 16-bit color graphics, large maps for seamless game play, and a proven interface.

GameSpot
Pharaoh takes Impressions' popular Caesar III, relocates it to ancient Egypt, and adds a few welcome features. Like Caesar III, Pharaoh's gameplay falls somewhere between the intensive city-management of Maxis' SimCity series and the combination of city management and combat found in Blue Byte's Settlers games. However, Pharaoh is neither a sequel nor an expansion to Caesar III; although many of the game mechanics are identical to its predecessor, the strategy is noticeably different in order to suit Pharaoh to its setting. Pharaoh is an all-around better game than Caesar III, and while it may seem overly familiar to fans of that game, it offers enough variety and innovation to keep things interesting.

The game begins simply, requiring you to create jobs and homes to attract settlers. Once your population begins growing, you must make sure it has food and water, access to religious facilities, entertainment, and other luxuries to attract a larger and more affluent populace. You must also ensure that your people are protected by a suitably strong militia.

Accomplishing these goals is a complex process. Most goods require natural resources in order to be produced, and many of these resources must be imported. Many of the goods must be imported as well, and you must manage the distribution of these items to make sure everyone is getting enough of what they need to survive and what they want to live happily. Imports can be pricey, so you must also produce items for export.

Unlike in SimCity, management of your city in Pharaoh is a very hands-on experience. With the sole exception of housing, which will upgrade itself based on nearby services, you decide exactly what type of building will be placed where. Storehouses and industrial buildings must be close enough to residences that goods will be easily accessible, but not so close that they lower property value. The same principle applies to markets, which distribute food and luxury items to your people. Those who found themselves frustrated by the inability to manage market workers' distribution routes in Caesar III will be glad to know that a roadblock option has been included in Pharaoh, giving you some control over where patrolling workers will walk. It's not a perfect solution - strict management over their routes would still be welcome - but it certainly helps.

The ancient Egyptian setting of the game leads to some other interesting new features. The regular flooding of the Nile River demands you produce or import enough food to last through the flood season. A poor inundation can lead to bad irrigation and food shortages, so satisfying the god of the flood, Osiris, becomes a top priority. The religion system in Pharaoh has also been improved since Caesar III. Satisfying the gods is now a higher priority, but there are fewer gods to deal with in each scenario, thereby making the process slightly less involved.

The primary play mode of Pharaoh is the "family" mode. You control a ruling family who must govern a series of cities, each time taking on more responsibility and earning more respect. The mission-based nature of this mode is interesting; instead of being a simple open-ended management simulation like SimCity, in Pharaoh you have very specific goals, but these can take a long time to achieve. New options and features are introduced at a rate that keeps things interesting, and the end result is a game with a great deal of longevity. Those who prefer a more open-ended simulation will want to play the game's "sandbox" mode, which lets you build and govern without the constraints of the scenario objectives.

Pharaoh's missions are also more involving than those in Caesar III. Combat is still a secondary element, but it is easy to control and never really becomes the focus. In most missions, you're required to build monuments, and these get larger and more costly as you progress. Not only does this provide a bit of tangible success to each scenario - seeing a huge pyramid completed is far more satisfying than reaching some arbitrary numerical rating - but the monuments also add some visual excitement to a game that otherwise looks like Caesar III with an Egyptian flavor. That's not to say it looks bad; the landscape graphics may be somewhat bland, but the building graphics and animations are detailed and appealing.

Pharaoh is only subtly different from its predecessor, but its new elements make it much deeper and more satisfying. Like Caesar III, Pharaoh takes ideas from other games and combines them in a way that is different and entertaining. Unlike Caesar III, the frustrations that accompany some of the game's mechanics are easily dealt with. Pharaoh is slow-paced but addictive and is immensely complex but incredibly easy to play. --Ron Dulin
--Copyright ©1999 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of GameSpot is prohibited.

Customer Reviews

Pharaoh lets you live forever... and you may need to!
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

One of the best I've seen!
This game is in every way as good and if not better than Caesar III. I own both games and I have to say they are two of the most addicting games I've played. They are so much alike and Pharaoh, though not a sequel or an add-on, adds more to the alreay masterful Caesar III.

There are many different perks in Pharaoh that make it very unique and fun. There are gods to worship, more industrial structures, more military units, combat on land and sea, you must make sure your citizens are happy, healthy, and fed enough, provide them with entertainment, law enforcement, and the best of them all, the construction of monuments. This game has pretty much all you could want and it is very easy to learn. The built in campaign teaches you how to play as you progress into the game. You can even interact with your citizens and see what they think of your wonderful city. But you better keep them happy because if you don't, they could revolt and turn your wonderful riches into worthless rubble!

If you haven't been able to grasp the concept of city building games or have never been very good, I suggest you try this one out! I'm sure you won't be sorry! I was never any good either, and look where I ended up, I can't put in down!

This one's definately a keeper!
As I moved closer to age 40, I began looking for games that were comprised of more than just shoot-em-up as fast as you can and keep-your-heart-racing-until-your-chest-explodes! During the last few years I've played SimCity 2000 & 3000, Civilization II, Civilization Call to Power, Settlers III, Caesar II and Caesar III.

Above all, my absolute favorites are Caesar III and Pharaoh (and soon to add Cleopatra Expansion pack).

Not only does one have the option of designing a beautiful city, but to succeed must learn to make things work as well, solving problems along the way to make the city run smoothly and properly.

Living conditions play a major role in how the game goes along. If they deteriorate, people are going to physically leave, moving out of the city before the player's eyes. Of course, an exodus like this can cause major problems in providing employment to much needed services. If people have no food or taxes too high they are likely to resort to crime or even rioting. The "god" effects (though optional--can be turned off) are absolutely astounding! Keep them happy and the rewards are great--anger them and suffer their wrath!

Other features such as fires and collapsing buildings can be frustrating at first, but once one learns how to handle them soon become a thing of the past. That's all part of "learning" how to build the best city one can--after all, fires and falling down buildings have always been a reality.

The player learns to depend on trade for revenues to keep the city functioning, and it's fun to watch the donkey caravans stopping at storage yards to buy and sell goods.

If city-building isn't a player's strong point and military is, that option is included as well. Along the military path winning criteria for each mission varies greatly from the more peaceful missions. Monuments are less grand, thus less time- and resource-consuming to build. Culture and Prosperity rating requirements are lower, giving the player the time and resources needed to concentrate on keeping their city safe rather than the epitomy of Egyptian society. (After all, at times just keeping a city is more useful to Pharaoh than if it contains the highest level of entertainment attainable.)

Since there is no "set" path one has to take in the game (you can inter-weave peaceful missions with military ones), and the fact a scenario editor is available from Impressions by downloading (and will be included in the new Cleopatra expansion), this game has great re-playability. There are also several websites available where one can download fan-made scenarios and get help for just about any predicament one would find themselves in.

I've been playing this game since I finally got mine in January or February, and I really can't see myself giving it up any time soon. :o)