If you've not played Pharaoh, but you've played Caesar III, it's just like that, except with seasonal flooding and with monuments (that take forever to build). If you've not played Caesar III or any of the spin-offs... Well, if you're into city builders and especially historical city builders (though this isn't one where your technology progresses over the centuries/millennia), or you're really into balancing a budget, or you're into building virtual pyramids, you will absolutely enjoy the hell out of this game.

I was extremely hooked on the original Pharaoh when it was still a relatively new game (and on all the other Caesar III variants), so I was thrilled when I found out about the remake. I bought it shortly after it was released and was immediately drawn back in. I have played enough different versions of these games that I don't recall exactly which features were included in which originals or were later added in mods, so I can't do a side-by-side comparison but I will say that I love the extra options in this new version. The option to turn global labor on or off is great! It gives you the power to decide how you want to play. You can play the classic way if you want that challenge but you can just as easily play the other way if you want to build nothing but perfect city blocks. I understand people have issues with the changes in the combat system but I honestly prefer it this way because I don't have to try to figure out which side of the map an attack is going to come from (the game will warn you sometimes two years ahead of time that an army is on its way, but it can't tell you which direction they are coming from?) and I was never really into the combat aspect of the game to begin with. I love that there's achievements, although some of them are pretty hard to get if you just play as you normally would and some of them will take a REALLY long time to get "The Internet is for Cats" is a delightful achievement and I very much enjoyed going out of my way to get that one :D I'm 76 hours in and I've built 16,520 roads of the 100,000 roads (i.e., road tiles) required for the "The Path of Progress" achievement.

Unfortunately, this game had some bugs when it was released. At one point all save games became corrupted and you could no longer advance. The devs deployed a fix for this shortly after but unfortunately my game auto-updated when my corrupted files were in a different folder (I'd moved them because doing that let you at least restart the level you were on or something. My memory is a little hazy at this point) so my game remained unfixed. I know I could have just contacted the devs because they were very responsive in discussions, but I just didn't want to deal and I didn't play for a year and a half. I just recently started completely over and I am exactly as hooked as I was at the turn of the millennium. I'm a little ways past the point where my game broke last time (that happened when I was getting close to the end of the Old Kingdom; I'm now early in the Middle Kingdom) and I have not encountered any notable bugs. In one of the Old Kingdom missions where you have to import a ton of stone (North and South Dahshur) I had three blocks of stone become "stuck" in a warehouse. That is to say, they remained unused for the duration of the game. I moved them to a different warehouse at one point so clearly they existed in the game and could be interacted with, but the laborers never picked them up. That's obviously a very minor issue, though.

Anyway, yes, it's all the thumbs up from me.

Fantastic remake! Great Quality of Life improvements and as a bonus the music SLAPS

the game takes you back to the original game. its worth a visit. the primary issue i have is that their military system absolutely does NOT capture the original games strategic control over military. the automated battle system is inferior.

Great remaster plays well! Nothing bad to say! If you haven't tried it yet you should! Easy to learn tough to master great game!

I played the original Pharaoh when I was a kid, so when I heard that the devs were doing a faithful recreation of it, I was ecstatic.

My main complaints are that the art is pretty different from the original and the menus can be a bit slow to get through.

Otherwise, if you enjoy the Ancient Egyptian aesthetic and city builders, this is an amazing game that you can make either as simple or as difficult as you want. One of my all-time favorite games.