City-Builder lover that I am, I admit quite shamefully that I missed out on the original game Pharaoh, released in 1999. Eager to revive the basic game for early fans and for a new fringe of players, the Bretons of Triskell Interactive are working on a remake of the game, which wants to be faithful to the original copy, while by making some improvements in comfort, to appear more "up-to-date".
Pharaoh: A New Era immerses us in the history of ancient Egypt via a scripted campaign of about 50 missions, which will make us evolve in time and will reveal new game mechanics. For this grip, we were entitled to a quick tutorial ( the same as the Steam demo if I remember correctly) where you learn to move around the map, place certain elements of the scenery and develop a nascent city. We quickly move on to another much denser level, with more varied objectives, which kept me spellbound for an hour without my seeing the end!
It must be said that although visually sumptuous, thanks to the goldsmith's work of the artists of the Breton studio, the game remains faithful to its two-decade-old mechanics, which earned me some trouble! Indeed, I build my city without asking myself too many questions. Dwellings here, shops there, water points scattered everywhere... everything is going well, I see my city evolving before my eyes. It's all pretty, the objectives follow each other without a hitch, then comes the time to go and exploit quarries. I build the necessary, new residential districts, etc... and I see the houses burning to the chain. "Surely the result of chance" I said to myself a little foolishly. I continue, and rebelote, it burns. Well, I'm rebuilding, but the finances are at their lowest... and there, the buildings allowing the extraction of gold are burning in turn, while the houses are collapsing.
Dumbfounded, I take a look around me to see if the other players are having a hard time... and I come face to face with a developer who looks at me with an amused air and invites me to follow the path of one of my "firefighters". So I look, and I see him going through the whole damn map before he gets there, after all the buildings are down. The idiot that I am asks if it is a bug or a will... And there, at the same time as he explains to me that this was how the original game worked , it's the revelation: the intersections of the tutorial. I look for the object, and I put it everywhere to mark out the neighborhoods so that everyone has everything they need: temples, a police station, a doctor, an architect, firefighters... and there, everything is better, it's wonderful. Because yes, the intersections allow the passage of citizens and other goods, but confine the agents type police, doctor, etc... to the affected district. All that remains is to add a few temples and other stelae so that the Gods are happy, otherwise I will still lose citizens with I don't know what fatal disease.
What impresses after this first handling of Pharaoh: A New Era, is to see that I barely scratched the surface in an hour. The game seems to be incredibly rich, and I better understand the studio's motivation to want to update THIS game specifically. Can't wait for its release, I'll be there, for sure!
