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The best game in my collection!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 9 / 9
Date: May 06, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I've had this game for years, almost as long as I've had my computer, and I still play it! It's challanging, but not frustrating or complicated, and I spend hours designing city layouts and constructing huge monuments. It's a challange to create the most efficent city I can, and that's what keeps me playing. Sure, it's not a high-stakes, shoot-'em-up game, it's a good, clean game for all ages, and I recommend it highly.

Excellent City building game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 8
Date: April 01, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Pharoah was a Christmas gift to me in 1999. I wore out a copy the first year I had it, and even now, over two years later, it's still my favorite of the strategy/city building games. There's so much to it that it can take a year or more to get used to it all.

The depth of the game is what I think I like the best. I played Caesar 3 for a while, but there was a lack of depth to it, all farms would yield the same amount of food, there was no massive project to keep you busy, the gods were all the same, and you didn't have a lot of choice over whether you had a peaceful or warring scenario. Pharoah changes that. Your farms will yield various amounts of food or goods based on the floodplain, the meadow, irrigation, or other things affecting them. Sometimes you run out of room in a storage yard or granary, and the workers in the field will stand there and be drowned. Sure, it's a little extreme, I don't expect the average citizen to allow themselves to be drowned, but it does give the "you snooze, you lose" feeling. If you can't store it, you lose it.

The gods are much improved over Caesar 3. Each god has a personality, and they have a pecking order now. There's a patron god for each scenario, and 0-4 local gods. The patron deity needs more attention than the lesser gods, and all gods can help or harm your city. You can get double crops, full storage yards, festivals thrown for other gods and other things if they are happy, and plagues, destroyed farms, and lowered kingdom ratings if you piss them off.

The monuments are another thing I like. You can't just meet the basic requirements; sometimes you have to build a monument as well, which takes time, supplies, and a lot of labor. It takes time to put a monument together, which is nice and annoying, if you need the time to finish up your city it's not a big deal, but if you've met all the other requirements in the scenario, the monument building can take a while.

All in all Pharoah is a great game. My only complaint is when I start a new family and I have to go through the first few levels, which are like an in-game tutorial. If you've played Caesar 3 before, or played Pharaoh before it can get old.

Be Prepared To Lose Sleep!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 8 / 8
Date: July 08, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game and the Cleopatra Expansion Pack not long after playing Caesar III. The graphics are by far the first thing that grabs your attention. Eveything from the buildings, to the monuments is breathtaking. The most amazing thing is watching the people that populate your towns interact with everything. From workers tending the farms, to facing incoming enemies, you could sit and watch for hours. Of course you can't. You have a kingdom to run. Build new homes, setup new roads, construct monuments, install new trade routes, build temples for gods, keep an eye on farming and food supply, watch for potentional problems from other kingdoms....did I leave anything out? All and all this is a very cool game. You can jump right in to this game and after mastering the control panel you should be all set to rule. There is a lot of trial and error in this game. It will take a lot of tries before you can really master everything and win the larger campaigns. Lucky thing Sierra provided a nice big reference manual to help you out! The main key to victory is being fast. You have to think several years ahead in the game and be one step ahead of your people's needs before you'll be running for cover. The only problem beyond the lack of sleep you're sure to have, and the amount of time that will fly by are really small. You have to continually check with your advisers, but it would help if some pop up menu would come up and remind you about setting up festivals or sending out requested goods. Also if you are working on a large mission, you can easily forget what buildings you have up or what you have in your storage yards. If there was a counter or a quicker referance system that could tell you what you have, the game might be a little smoother. Still this is a great game to play, and anyone who enjoys Egypt and wants to rule an empire should grab a copy today.

A great game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 9
Date: May 05, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Pharoah is a game in witch you can build cities and create a mighty empire. This game is not like a Age of Empire and in a way it takes more skill to play. You will become addicted to this game and I would Highly recommend it to everybody.

Awesome and addicting!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 11 / 15
Date: November 12, 1999
Author: Amazon User

Basically Ceaser III with Egyption graphics. If you like city-building strategy games, you'll like this game. The only drawback is that the pyramids and other monuments take forever to build, so you have to be patient.

The river is deep and wide

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 11 / 15
Date: January 31, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Derek, who reviews this game a few reviews below this one, made some cogent points about "Pharaoh". It is *not* very intuitive and it *is* frustrating, at first. But those are two of the truly marvelous things about this game, things which make it very worth the money and time it takes to become even a little proficient at it. One must take the time to run through the tutorials, play the demos (Derek is right on when he recommends d/ling the demos: check out Hotgames.com for those) and be willing to learn the lessons that they teach. Ancient peoples learned to survive and build their civilizations by observing, over and over, the patterns of nature, and by trying to manipulate those patterns; they didn't have users' manuals, you know!

The objects (plural) are not always mutual agreeable, but then, this is how most of our lives run, anyway, right? "Pharaoh" not only is a lot of fun once you get the hang of it, it can also help you see how things interconnect, a valuable tool for games and for Life. Consider that when you can't figure out why your boss wants something done in a way or within a time-frame that doesn't make sense, or why an environmental group opposes a new development because of habitat destruction: everything connects to everything else.

But forget the philosophy if that bores you. Watching a bunch of hunters shooting arrows into a flock of ostriches to get the blood going! Whoops! There's a fire in the bazaar! Where *is* that bucket brigade? What do you mean, I can't build a temple there?

Take a chance on this one! I really do think that anyone with a cerebral bent of any sort will find a lot to like in this game. And because so many of the problems will allow multiple solutions, it is doubtful that anyone will exhaust the possibilities.

Worth Every Penny!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: December 25, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Pharaoh is an extremely thought-provoking, strategy-dependent game. The setting is ancient Egypt. What's nice about Pharaoh is that they don't through everything [options] at you at once (concerning the city-building, etc). You start in the Pre-Dynastic period, working your way up through villages to larger towns, each time increasing your "responsibility" level. (aka, more food options, trade available, etc.). In the Archaic period, you focus more on building towns and military. It goes up through 4 more periods after that; so that your finished product is a magnificent city, with shining temples, large industry, satisfied citizens, and an able military. This game is worth every penny!

Oldie but a Goodie

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: February 20, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Check the date on my review - 3 years old and this game is still fun to play. That's saying something. Pharaoh is basically SimCity set in Ancient Eygpt (or if you're really picky, it's Casear3 with new graphics). Not only does it take the great classic city-building game and place it in a compelling setting, but it also adds some much needed depth to this type of game, like huge monuments and pyramids for you to build.

Games of this type all do the same thing - you layout streets and houses, little people move in, and you gradually add services and extras to make them happier, more wealthy. You make sure every neighborhood has a policeman and a firewatch, a market, someplace to worship, and some entertainment. Pharoah improves over Simcity by actually showing you your citizens as they walk from place to place. The streets are packed with people as they go about their business. You must also create jobs and establish industries, thus creating goods for you to sell or your citizens to use. It is a basic game that is fun for anyone of any age.

Pharoah adds some extra features which allow it to rise above the others - Monuments, and Nile farming. The Nile works on an annual cycle of flooding its banks, so any aggriculture must be very well planned because your farmers must grow food for the entire year. Monuments are just what you expect from ancient Eygpt - pyramids, the Sphinx, Obelisx, and various Temple complexs. They are huge, and you can watch as your workers build them brick by brick, dragging the stones from quarries, up the wooded ramps, to atop the pyramids. Wonderful.

an amazing must have...

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: March 28, 2002
Author: Amazon User

i'm not big on unqualified approval but i have to say that, though i've always been partial to city building games like Caesar 2, this is HANDS DOWN the best i have ever played... it's so much more intricate than all of the others before it as well as the others that were made at the same time (after playing pharaoh i thought problematic caesar 3 was a waste of money...)

the only problems i've had is that importing can be kind of slow... some of the monuments take days to build.. .. literally.. and it's because you have to import one of the component materials.. and sometimes the population age can really mess up your workforce.. .. but only if you build in one huge spurt (which is my problem, i guess, not the game's..)

in either case i just ordered the expansion pack.. and i'm worried that this series is going to ruin my life.. i haven't done my homework for weeks.. :) and work on my thesis is falling behind schedual.. .. try telling your graduate advisor that you couldn't finish on time because of a video game..

Good, but slightly annoying

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 7 / 8
Date: October 30, 2000
Author: Amazon User

This game is very fun to play. It's almost like SimCity with an ancient setting. Though it's fun to play, at the start of each level you have to start another city over again--from bear terrain. Overall, it's worth the money, but over time it becomes annoying to keep building cities that can take many hours to build at a time.

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