Ward off the collapse of civilization and vie for the throne in Total War: PHARAOH! Read on to find out whether or not its graphics, gameplay, and Bronze Age setting is worth a buy in our review.
Total War: PHARAOH Review Overview
Total War: PHARAOH Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Improved Grand Strategy Gameplay Clear Character and Faction Progression One of the Few Strategy Titles Set in the Bronze Age | Game Has a Small Campaign Map, Lacks Important Bronze Age Civilizations New Resource System Can Get Too Tedious At Times In-Game Events Are Underwhelming |
Total War: PHARAOH Overall - 66/100
Total War: PHARAOH is a solid real-time strategy game that decently captures the feeling of warfare during the late Bronze Age, bringing great visuals, good music, and epic battles. However, the game feels too small to be considered a mainline Total War title. Despite it being priced like a full feature game, it’s limited by its smaller map, and lacks other major Bronze Age civilizations, like the Assyrians. Whether or not these missing factions will be added through DLC is moot; the game itself is too small to be considered the ultimate Bronze Age experience.
Total War: PHARAOH Story - 6/10
Total War: PHARAOH has put some effort into making you role-play as the faction of your choice. Whether you play as the Egyptian general Ramesses, the Canaanite raider Irsu, or the Hittite pretender Kurunta, each playthrough can be unique because of the different progression systems you unlock as you play. Aside from Royal Decrees (the game’s research tree), you also have gods to worship, as well as Royal Traditions that will make you your country’s top dog if you play your cards right. Compared to older Total War games, it’s a much more immersive and character-centric progression that can take you in.
Total War: PHARAOH Gameplay - 8/10
Previous Total War games already had a good balance of grand strategy and real-time combat, but Total War PHARAOH takes it up a notch with its own unique twists. Real-time battles here require constant focus on outmaneuvering your opponent with infantry, as horses are few and far between. This limitation leads to fast and fluid fights. Meanwhile, Campaign Map gameplay is a balancing act of keeping a large enough army on the field and keeping your economy from collapsing from a lack of resources. The result? A more aggressive gameplay experience that’s relatively realistic, but can grow tedious at times.
Total War: PHARAOH Visuals - 8/10
Total War: PHARAOH boasts stunning visual presentation, with finely-detailed character designs and environments that immerse you in Bronze Age grandeur. Post-processing effects, like god rays, glow effects and heat rays (because what kind of desert-set game doesn't have heat?) complete the look and bring it to life. The Egyptians and Hittites especially shine in this game, with their unique aesthetics in full display, seen in their structures, units, and colorful statues.
Total War: PHARAOH Audio - 7/10
The voice acting in Total War: PHARAOH is strong, though your units all speak in badly accented English, just like in most Total War titles. As for the music, it’s a mishmash of tribal beats, drums, and chanting in the background - nothing too riveting. The soundtrack actually almost sounds like something that would’ve come out with Total War: Rome 2, or even Atilla. The music has just enough identity to call their factions to mind, but that’s about it.
Total War: PHARAOH Value for Money - 4/10
For a title that’s touted as a historical game in the mainline series, Total War: PHARAOH feels awfully a lot like an expanded entry in Total War’s "Saga" sub-series instead, with a small map and relatively few factions. Major Bronze Age civilizations like the Mycenaeans and Assyrians are outright missing from the game. And you can’t even play as the Sea Peoples - those of mysterious origins who ravaged the ancient world. It should be expected that if they ever even make it into the game, these factions will be sold as DLC. Even if by some miracle, they decide to make the factions DLC free, the map is still too small to properly deal with them.
Total War: PHARAOH Review: Big on Strategy, Small on Content
Total War: PHARAOH has the makings of a good historical Total War title: great presentation, immersive campaigns, and a setting many people haven’t delved into - the Bronze Age. However, compared to past historical Total War games, the ones before titles set in the Warhammer universe dominated the franchise, Total War: PHARAOH feels a lot like a spin-off rather than a mainline title.
Don’t get me wrong; it’s a great game. The strategic and tactical gameplay are solid, the art style and presentation bring to life the ancient era it is set in, along with the voice acting and music. All of these combine to create a great experience. However, the scope of the game, its map size, and the number of civilizations we actually get to play with kind of makes it go to waste. It shows signs of what was probably a smaller-scale Total War spin-off that got additional funding and was turned into a mainline title. Alternatively, maybe it was planned to be much bigger but they ran out of budget or time. Either way, players will still have to pay full price for this lightly packed game.
Total War: PHARAOH is a solid historical game, but its size doesn’t quite justify its asking price, especially when you compare it to other historical Total War games that were much, much grander in scope.
Pros of Total War: PHARAOH
| Things Total War: PHARAOH Got Right |
|---|
|
Improved Grand Strategy Gameplay Clear Character and Faction Progression One of the Few Strategy Titles Set in the Bronze Age |
Improved Grand Strategy Gameplay
If you’re a veteran Total War player, the first thing you’ll notice is that the resources on the campaign map have changed. In older games, generating enough "money" (be it gold, denarii, or koku) was enough to keep your empire running and your armies on the field. In Total War: PHARAOH, you have to juggle five resources: Gold to pay for elite units, Food to feed all your soldiers, Bronze to arm them, and both Wood and Stone to construct buildings and maintain your faction’s infrastructure.
Most factions in the game start off lacking one of these major resources. So, for example, if you’re playing as Ramesses, you’ll find that you need somewhere to get more Stone to continue upgrading your buildings. This will affect which areas of the map you will attack, and forces you to engage in diplomacy with other factions to trade for that resource. It’s obvious that Total War: PHARAOH took this system from the spin-off "A Total War Saga: TROY," which had the same economic model in-game.
Just this change alone affects how you play the game; if you’re starting off with a resource shortage, you’ll be forced to either go to war with someone who owns that resource or play nice with them. It’s more realistic in a way since no faction is an island, after all. It’s not like in previous Total War titles, where you could hole up in your corner of the map and focus on generating income so that you could steamroll all the other factions later. You have to participate in the world of the game as early as Turn 1, and that’s amazing.
Clear Character and Faction Progression
Tying into the improved grand strategy gameplay is Total War: PHARAOH’s faction and character progression systems. Within each of the game’s three cultures (Egyptian, Canaanite, and Hittite) are various sub-factions, each with their own Gods, Royal Traditions, Ancient Legacies, and Titles (perks). These systems allow the player to mold their faction according to their playstyle.
Let’s return to Ramesses as an example. Since he’s Egyptian, he can worship Egypt’s gods such as Ra, Ptah, Thoth, Horus, Anubis, Isis, Set, Amun, Osiris, and even Aten. Each god grants various benefits to your faction, such as more workers and increased melee damage for all your units in the case of Ra. This kind of perk is perfect, since Ramesses is supposed to be played aggressively with his elite armies that burn through food stocks rather quickly.
Ramesses can also participate in the Egyptian Royal Tradition, a system that can land him a spot in the Egyptian Kingdom’s court. Achieving this will offer different perks depending on what position you take. Taking on the role as Egypt’s ‘First Commander,’ for example, will grant Ramesses access to discounts when buying certain units, as well as the ability to recruit elite Egyptian units.You can also scheme against rival courtiers, currying favor with some while damaging the reputation of others. In some cases, you can even outright have them ejected from their post or assassinated.
This same Royal Tradition will also allow Ramesses to try and usurp the position of Pharaoh once Merneptah (the pharaoh at the start of the game) dies. It’ll be perfect, then, for Ramesses to follow the Ancient Legacy of Thutmose the Conqueror, which would give him the ability to plan the conquest of major cities and give himself the advantage when he tries to take them for himself.
So as you can see, as the game progresses and the systems available to you grow, you’re able to pick and choose which perks you’d like to have. And compared to older Total War titles where you’re given free reign as to how to develop your faction characters, Total War: PHARAOH is much, much more laser-focused. The progression systems in place simultaneously makes your favorite commanders powerful, and immerses you in the setting with scheming, religion, and the legacy of the ancients.
One of the Few Strategy Titles Set in the Bronze Age
There’s no other historical time period that has received so little attention from the video game industry as the Bronze Age. Even though we know how epic this time in history was, especially during its catastrophic end in with the Bronze Age Collapse, it’s strange that there’s only a handful of titles that are set within it, like the Hegemony series.
So far, this is the only game where I’ve seen what Cannanites and Hittites looked like (in contrast to Bronze Age Egyptians, which are much more common in video games). In Total War: PHARAOH, I got to see their aesthetics, what their buildings look like, how their units are dressed. I also learned a bit about how their societies are structured and how their people generally lived.
Granted, the Total War series isn’t 100% historically accurate, but Total War: PHARAOH has that same quality as Rome: Total War and Total War: Rome 2, in that it gives players a springboard from which they could learn more about the Bronze Age. This is why I’m personally a sucker for historical Total War titles: I always love a good history lesson. And thankfully, Total War: PHARAOH doesn’t disappoint in this regard despite lacking content.
Cons of Total War: PHARAOH
| Things That Total War: PHARAOH Can Improve |
|---|
|
Game Has a Small Campaign Map, Lacks Important Bronze Age Civilizations New Resource System Can Get Too Tedious At Times In-Game Events Are Underwhelming |
Game Has a Small Campaign Map, Lacks Important Bronze Age Civilizations
The biggest setback for Total War: PHARAOH is how it lacks content, especially compared to older historical Total War titles despite being a mainline game. First off, the map stretches from Southern Egypt, up the Levant, Canaan, then Eastern and Central Anatolia. That means no Greece or Assyria, which also means no Mycenaeans or Assyrians, both major Bronze Age civilizations in their own right.
In-game, the map looks hardly small because it’s been scaled up for balance. But for a game that’s been touted as the ultimate Bronze Age experience, Creative Assembly should’ve gone all-in and rendered Greece, Assyria, and maybe even Babylon, bringing with it the corresponding factions to boot. That would’ve been the ultimate Bronze Age experience. Total War: PHARAOH may well be the ultimate Egyptian Bronze Age experience, but definitely not of the Bronze Age as a whole.
After all, you don’t even get to play as the Sea Peoples - those mysterious raiders shrouded in myth and legend, able to take the greatest Bronze Age civilizations while bringing the survivors down to their knees. Sure, we have a campaign for the Canaanite warlord Irsu, who loves the whole "rape and pillage" shtick. But it would’ve been even better to get to play as the Sea Peoples, all with their own faction mechanics. The Total War franchise already introduced a "horde" mechanic, where nomadic armies also operated as their own resource-producing cities, so I don’t see why something similar could’ve been done in Total War: PHARAOH.
New Resource System Can Get Too Tedious At Times
The resource system Total War: PHARAOH borrowed from A Total War Saga: TROY is great overall. But if you don’t know what you’re doing, it can really ruin your playthrough. Food, in particular, will always be lacking. This is doubly true if you have a big army that you’re trying to use to stomp through Egypt or the Hittite Kingdom.
Though the game has the "outpost" system, which introduces outposts your armies can approach for different benefits such as increased map movement speed or lower upkeep, these measures are just not enough. It can get really tough to maintain an army on the field unless you have enough giant stocks of food - and maybe this was really meant to be the case, since one of the biggest criticisms of the Total War games was on how unrealistically they handled logistics. But still, maybe a rebalancing is in order - they could cut an army’s food upkeep by half so that food remains an issue, but not so much of a never-ending issue where you either end up starving or without an army to defend your own lands with (since you would’ve had to disband your units to free up your upkeep and get food production back in the green).
In-Game Events Are Underwhelming
For an event as tumultuous for the Bronze Age as the invasion of the Sea Peoples, I barely noticed it happening at all while I was playing. You see, in Total War: PHARAOH, certain events trigger after a number of turns like in other Total War titles. Here, the main historical event is the death of the Egyptian Pharaoh Merneptah, followed by the ensuing civil war, where pretenders to the throne squabble over who gets to sit on the now-empty throne.
At least those events got their own in-game cinematic. The invasion of the Sea People, by comparison, was barely given a notification on the top right corner of the screen when my 30th turn began. Total War games, especially the historical ones, are known for making spectacles out of major historical events. CA could’ve at least given the arrival of the Sea Peoples (as well as in-game Hittite and Caananite events) the same pomp and flair the Egyptians got with their historical events.
Is Total War: PHARAOH Worth It?
It’s Good, but Wait for a Sale
Even if you like strategy games, and the Total War games in particular, I find it hard to suggest getting Total War: PHARAOH right from the get-go. It’s a good game by many of our metrics - gameplay, visuals, audio, even the story. But when you compare it to past historical Total War games, it just feels so much smaller in scope, with a lack of content to boot. It’s still a full price AAA game, mind you.
Still, it’s one of the few titles that actually tried bringing the Bronze Age to video games. If you’re a big Bronze Age aficionado, or even someone interested in learning about the era, Total: PHARAOH is a good jumping off point. Just buy it when it goes on sale, especially once it comes out with its inevitable faction pack DLCs as Total War games (and Creative Assembly) are wont to do. Until then, probably give it a pass.
Total War: PHARAOH Overview & Premise
The 19th dynasty of Egypt is about to come to an end. Merneptah, beloved of the gods, has ruled the divine kingdom for over a decade already, and already death stalks him. It’s only a matter of time before he goes into Anubis’ embrace, a fact not lost on others in the kingdom’s court. The different lords and courtiers of Egypt put forth schemes to take over the moment he leaves his throne empty.
To the north, the Hittite Kingdom is about to be ravaged by a brutal civil war between the Great King Suppiluliuma, and the great pretender to the throne, Kurunta. To the east, in the anarchic lands of Canaan, the Egyptian envoy Bay looks at Egypt and contemplates taking advantage of the disorder among his erstwhile masters. Meanwhile, the vicious raider Irsu is hungry for blood and gold - and it seems that it’s a perfect opportunity to do some good ol’ pillaging.
But unbeknownst to them all, an even greater threat is coming from the sea, threatening the arrival of a new and terrible age - a collapse of the world as the Bronze Age knew it.
Total War: PHARAOH FAQ
What Are Total War: PHARAOH’s Factions and Units?
With Total War: PHARAOH being set during the New Kingdom period of Ancient Egypt - before the Late Bronze Age Collapse, there are several ancient factions you can take control of and conquer the Sinai Peninsula, the Levant, and even Cyprus and Anatolia.
● Egyptians
● Canaanites
● Hittites
Each of these factions has its own sub-factions, which all have different starting points, different units, and different tactics.
For example, the Egyptian sub-factions composed of Rameses, Seti, Tausret, and Amenmesse each have units that can be recruited faction-wide, as well as their own special units and buildings.
Ramesses has Medjay and Sherden troops that are low in number but fast and adept at flanking enemies. Seti uses the expendable Levy troops, Tausret’s armies are backed by Chariot-riding warriors, and Amenmesse has access to powerful archer units from the Kushite, Nubian, and Ta-Ceti tribes of Kush.
The Hittites and Caananites have their own sub-factions as well.
For the Hittites, Suppiluliuma’s sub-faction upholds the power of the Great King himself. They they have access to heavy armor and spear chariots. Meanwhile, Kurunta’s sub-faction follows the man who believes himself to be the Stag God of Hittite lore. At his service are armies of melee attackers like Hittite Chargers and Kaskian Warriors.
Meanwhile, the Caanites are divided between the diplomatic and secretive Bay, and the wild anarchist raider Irsu. Bay’s forces are composed of quick ambushers and militiamen who can catch their unsuspecting foes off-guard, while Irsu’s forces have shunned subtlety in exchange for sheer brutality on the battlefield.
How Big Is Total War: PHARAOH’s Map?
Total War: PHARAOH’s campaign map covers the areas of Egypt (East Egypt, Central Egypt, Kush, the Sinai Peninsula), the Levant, and Anatolia (Eastern and Central Anatolia). Though the area is small, it’s about on par with Total War: Rome 2 in terms of number of regions (roughly around 180 versus Rome 2’s 183). But it’s certainly smaller in terms of scope compared to past historical Total War titles.
Total War: PHARAOH Product Information
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| Title | Total War: PHARAOH |
|---|---|
| Release Date | October 11, 2023 |
| Developer | Creative Assembly |
| Publisher | Sega |
| Supported Platforms | PC |
| Genre | Real-Time Strategy |
| Number of Players | 1-2 |
| ESRB Rating | Teen |
| Official Website | Total War: PHARAOH Website |
