The most impressive part of Total War: Pharaoh isn't the beautifully-detailed map of the Nile Valley, the exciting Late Bronze Age setting, or the striking interface that looks like it was copied straight off of a tomb wall in the Valley of Kings. It's the fact that Creative Assembly Sophia has pulled me right back into a fairly traditional, historical Total War and made it feel like a fresh experience, even when I've been playing this series for over 20 years now. It has some rough edges, especially the further you get from the heart of Egypt. But that little bit of sand in my sandals is easy to endure when Pharaoh is at its best.
Egypt itself is really the star of Total War: Pharaoh, and whether you're on the campaign or the battle map, it makes its personality known with wonderful art, effective lighting, and challenging geography. It would be easy to imagine dozens of repetitive battles fought on bumpy sand, but there are many riffs on the general themes of sunbaked flood plains and rocky desert peaks that lend a sense of place and new tactical possibilities. I particularly came to enjoy hiding my troops just behind the sharp crest of a soaring sand dune when facing an army with elite archers, only springing the trap when they were close enough that their ranged advantage was meaningless.
The winding snake of the Nile and the inhospitable deserts on either side strongly shaped every strategic decision I made, too. Sailing the river itself is by far the fastest way to get anywhere, so sticking close to it is like having access to a super highway. It cuts both ways, though. Especially later on when the Sea People are invading in force, they can swiftly slink upriver to bypass your strongest defenses, which led to some exciting chases to catch them before they could torch the soft underbelly of my empire.
On the other end of the spectrum, crossing open desert with no established paths causes appropriately punishing attrition unless you stop and camp regularly, which can slow you down to a crawl. Cleverly, every settlement is connected by roads to somewhere. But on the fringes, they're often not connected to their closest neighbors as the crow flies. You may even need to go two or three provinces North or South to find an ideal route, so speed versus safety was always an interesting consideration. Add in the near-constant threat of Libyan invaders in the West, always targeting my hardest-to-access settlements, and I really felt the welcome pressure I'm looking for in a Total War grand campaign.
Relative to other recent Total Wars, Pharaoh is noticeably more challenging. I often play on Very Hard in Warhammer 3, and I found that even stepping down to Hard in this one gave me enough pushback that I had to start four or five campaigns before I really got a good run going. That's a satisfying balance point. Starting in the South as the Kushite Viceroy Amenmesse, the civil wars and foreign invasions bleeding Egypt dry kept me on my toes for more than 100 turns before my snowball – or is it a sandball? – got too big to be stopped. I was a bit disappointed by the last, huge, apocalyptic wave of the Sea People invasion, as I was able to deal with it fairly easily by that point. But to be fair, I had all of Lower Egypt, at the mouth of the Nile, serving as a filter between me and the sea. If I was hanging out in the delta, I might have had a more thrilling endgame.
Even if the Sea People weren't ruining my day directly, their burning of city centers outside my borders was definitely felt even down in Nubia. The Bronze Age Collapse is modeled by a bar that slides from prosperity, to crisis, to collapse, with stacking bonuses for the invaders and penalties for the settled factions the lower it goes. The idea that I was making my way up the Nile and rebuilding civilization as I went, pulling the world out of a dark age punctuated by eerie changes in sound and lighting, served as a decent motivation to keep pushing even after I'd achieved my standard victory objectives and was too strong to really be challenged.
The richness of the campaign is enhanced by what may be the most in-depth set of empire management mechanics in any Total War so far. There's a whole new layer to every settlement for outposts, which are smaller sub-buildings that have their own physical location, and can be anything from the unique Valley of the Kings monument to a fort that can be staffed with a full stack of defending troops. The latter allowed me to defend some very far-flung areas without needing to station a general, and changed how I approached offensive wars. In a province with a fort, you usually want to "set a pick" with a smaller army, to borrow a sports term, and then go after the main settlement with your larger army, so you don't have to fight both garrisons at once.
The ability to build waystations, trading posts, and temples, which give you some movement points back once visited, can also create a speedy overland travel network in the developed areas of your empire – but a single raid to knock out one link in the chain may leave your armies stranded. This all speaks to the cleverness and care with which CA Sophia has layered more interesting decisions and play style choices onto this venerable formula. And that's without even digging into the robust, hands-on systems for court politics, civil wars, and earning the favor of the gods.
Some of these mechanics are afflicted by a minor plague of bugs, though. I got to use my Legacy power, following in the footsteps of Thutmose the Conqueror, only once before it seemed to freeze up and never grant me any rewards for my future victories. One of the powers you unlock after becoming Pharaoh that is supposed to allow you to forcibly annex smaller factions of your culture simply wasn't usable on anyone, and the tooltip became a blank, white box, so I couldn't even figure out why. Influence, which determines how dominant your culture is in a region, is also a very opaque mechanic with inadequate tooltips that can really only be mastered through trial and error.
And unfortunately, a lot of the best aspects of the campaign only shine brightly if you're playing in Egypt. To be fair, Egypt itself is a massive, fulfilling canvas to paint the story of your empire upon. In my 120+ turns as Amenmesse, I didn't even reach the borders of Canaan. But the peripheral areas beyond the Sinai Peninsula definitely didn't get the same attention and flavor. It'd be a bit unfair to say they feel tacked on, but this is definitely a game about Egypt where everyone else is a side story.
Each region looks just as beautiful and detailed as the Nile. The green mountain valleys of Hatti almost feel like a different world when you've been choking on dust in the Sahara for ages. But they also feel cramped, and weirdly cut off. For instance, the playable part of Anatolia slices off the Western and Northern coasts of the peninsula, which just feels awkward and unnatural.
Even in Egypt's case, I wouldn't say the spot they chose to end the map in the South makes much sense, missing the ancient city of Meroë that was hugely important to the Kingdom of Kush, which features prominently in Egyptian politics. And having a game about the Late Bronze Age that doesn't include the Mesopotamian heavy-hitters like Assyria, Elam, and Babylon – just off the edge of Pharaoh's map – gives the whole epic an aftertaste of incompleteness. I genuinely hope we get some DLC that takes things a bit further East.
The outer regions also lack the political richness of Egypt. The Hittities only have two playable characters and two Ancient Legacies to pursue, compared to Egypt's four and four. That means there are really only four different playstyles for them, compared to Egypt's 16, since you can mix and match any legacy with any character. Suppulilumia is a punishingly difficult but interesting run as you try to salvage a collapsing kingdom, but I never got over the feeling of being boxed in by the weird map borders. And the geography of Anatolia doesn't create the same interesting, strategic puzzles as Egypt.
Canaan doesn't even have its own royal traditions. Bay is basically an Egyptaboo who wants to become Egyptian himself – which is good, in a way, because it points him toward a more interesting part of the map. But if you want to play a Canaanite who stays in Canaan, you're basically stuck with Irsu. And I hope you like raiding, because that's his entire thing. I didn't enjoy what I played of his campaign much.