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Rather than try to reinvent the wheel with its follow-up to the Roman city-building classic Caesar III, Impressions Studios takes us farther back in time to the burning sands of the Nile River delta. Pharaoh is a more primitive, but also more grandiose, strategic experience. The result is, admittedly, much like Caesar III, but different enough to grab and hold your attention even if you're already a master builder from the later time period.
Pharaoh is heavily steeped in Caesar's legacy. The maps, graphics, layout, and basic strategy have been moved over intact from Caesar III. You zone housing, buildings, and roads and hope they attract immigrants, and then tweak them to maximize efficiency. You must control taxation, create neighborhoods and businesses, fight battles, and accomplish all this at a frantic real-time pace.
Still, fans of the previous games will find enough differences to throw them for a loop. Egypt is at the mercy of the Nile's notoriously fickle flood/recede patterns. If the flooding doesn't leave much fertile land in a given year, a food shortage is guaranteed. You cannot depend on crops the way you did in Rome, so you have to make sure you have enough money to buy food from other cities in the event of a shortage. Since the Egyptians never developed aqueduct systems, you must zone housing only on or near grasslands, which limits and alters your familiar city-building patterns. It's a challenge to make sure your neighborhoods have access to all the amenities they demand when housing space is so limited.
Pharaoh consists of several stand-alone scenarios and a massive campaign that, in an inspired gameplay choice, casts you as progenitor of your own dynasty. You aren't a city governor going from region to region as with the Caesar series - you begin as the founder of a city, and then play as that founder's descendants over the course of 2,000 years, eventually becoming Pharaoh and building monuments that will stand throughout history (until Lara Croft comes along to defile them, of course). The early stages of the campaign serve as a tutorial, gradually introducing you to the buildings, commands and various gameplay concepts. The only problem with this system is that old-school fans will try to skip ahead, creating cities with problems that cannot be solved as the right building or resource isn't available yet.
It's the building of monuments that proves to be the greatest addition and challenge in Pharaoh. A pyramid worthy of your ruler's ego requires a tremendous outlay of resources. You'll need stockpiles of materials or access to trade. If you don't plan things right, you can go from thriving metropolis to plague- ridden ghost town in those years. But watching your pyramid actually being built is an awesome sight, and once finished, the completed monument provides a unique thrill. In Pharaoh, the ancient Egyptian gods are real and must be appeased with frequent festivals and numerous temples. Making a goddess like Bast unhappy is a bad idea, as she has control over your peoples happiness. Osirus controls the Nile and Ptah influences commerce. So unhappy deities can, and inevitably will, create severe problems for your city.
All is not beer and ostrich meat in the game's design, though, as a few problems hamper enjoyment. There are annoying slowdowns as messages pop up (which they do with annoying frequency) and the game's autosave freezes you for 10 seconds every five minutes. Both these options can be turned off, but it isn't a good idea to do so unless you have mastered the game completely. Also, since this is a tweaked version of the same graphics engine as Caesar III, the color palette looks tired, and the animation comes across as a bit stilted.
Pharaoh is similar enough to Caesar III to make it familiar to old-school fans, but will reward new players as well. Budding Ahknatons or Tutankhamuns take note - immortality and a great dynasty (not to mention monuments that will stand for millennia) are now at hand.