Fate of the Pharaoh – PC Game Review

Today I’m looking at Fate of the Pharaoh, a release from Cateia Games.

Now many of you may think that a game from Cateia Games may not be worth your few quid, but I’d typically beg to differ. With the game being available for as little as £3 from their website it’s got to be worth a go, right?

With a sales pitch of ‘building glorious Egyptian towns and expanding your realm’, it intrigued me… so off I went to download it and get stuck in.

Fate of the Pharaoh is pretty much a point and click game, without the need for the keyboard your left, or right (if you’re a lefty!) hand gets a nice rest while the other clicks away. Though I found mine wanting to do something..

These games seem to be growing increasingly popular now after the release of many city building games on social networking sites. Which obviously became popular because people enjoyed the likes of Age of Empires, Stronghold and many other games that require you to build up your own existence.

Following in the footsteps of others may not always lead you down the right path, however.

Set in the Egyptian days, the story is a rather simple one. Your empire has crumbled after repelling invaders of war and you’re on a mission to rebuild it and become the greatest Pharaoh that ever lived.

Of course as with any game I play, the first task is to crank up the graphics! To my surprise they’re pretty neat.. obviously there aren’t many options for the graphics, only visual quality, shadows, effects and of course resolution. The only other options you’ll find is one for a custom cursor, and then the sound options.

As you first progress in the single player campaign, you’re presented with an bird’s eye view of the playing field, so you get to see everything you need to on the one screen. No need to pan around and get confused or lose track over what you’re doing.

With the help of the tutorial, you pick things up pretty quickly and as the first few levels are pretty much a tutorial in themselves, it only takes you about 30 minutes to complete the first batch.

The main focus of the game is to basically build up a town, and complete the objectives given to you by one of your loyal servants. When first starting off, there’s not much to build – you build basic tents to house your people, a well to supply them with water, which in turn keeps them happy and willing to pay their taxes, and finally a quarry to produce materials, to allow you to build and upgrade. I’ll explain more about the buildings in a minute.

Each few levels you progress, you gain access to new buildings or at least the ability to upgrade buildings that you have already built, or were already there. As well as providing water to keep your people happy, you eventually need to supply them with food too via a farm, how they survived so long without it in the first place, I’m not too sure… I’m more amazed at the fact that your servants don’t seem to need either…

Speaking of happiness, if your people lack this then you’re going to lack money, no happy – no money. So one of the main tasks is to make sure they’re always well watered and fed! This task can be helped later on by the addition on the warehouse, this allows you to store excess water and food to slow down the timer on the dwellings of your people. Happiness is often one of the mission objectives before you can complete, so it’s always good to make that one of your priorities.

There’s 4 different types of dwellings to build as you progress, the first being the tent, followed by the cottage, house and then the residence. Each housing progression allows you to collect more taxes. With the tent being a low income, the cottage and house a medium income, and the residence a high income… you’d think it obvious what you need to build. however it’s not always the case because of the mission objectives… each style of housing has the ability to be upgraded from level 1 to level 3, this generates higher taxes so more income for you.

There’s again 4 different building types that are essential in helping you along your way:

Firstly we have the Quarry – this provides basic materials for keeping your town up and running, allowing you to upgrade buildings and repair them.

The Well – very basic building that supplies your people with water to live.

The Farm – Supplies food for your inhabitants

Finally the Warehouse – as mentioned earlier this stores up food and water, allowing you to concentrate that little bit more on your tasks.

The final set of buildings to mention fall under the wealth category:

Workshops will help increase your wealth, but will cause a slow decline in happiness due to noise.

The Market – Allows you to sell off excess materials for gold.

The Academy – Educates your inhabitants to help significantly increase you wealth. Last but certainly not least, The Temple – Not only does it increase wealth, but will slowly increase your inhabitant’s happiness too.

As you make your way through the levels, you’ll come across obstacles that try to hinder your progression. Animals that need shooing away with your specialised workers…. (which requires no additional game play at all, as it’s the same workers every single time…) Old logs of wood that need destroying to pass, and even thieves! These little scamps won’t go away until you pay them some gold to clear the path. Scoundrels..

They’re quite a hindrance in the way that if your people need to pass nearby to collect water or food, they will refuse.

The game comes with its own built in achievement feature. Though it’s lacking in things to achieve… in fact it just has one. When playing each level you have a timer on the right side that slowly drains called The Time of Ra. Completing a level within The Time of Ra will see you get additional points at the end. Along with a pretty little star on your ticked mission just to show you’ve done it. The achievements jump up in levels – The first appears after 4, while the second comes after 9. The tasks required for these can be read in the achievements tab on the main menu page.

To be fair, I have to give Cateia Games their dues here. For a game that costs little over £3 it’s worth the buy. Sure after a few levels it gets rather repetitive, and you’ll probably find yourself closing it down, but a few hours later you’ll fancy having another go.

Again for a game this price, the graphics aren’t so bad – but saying that, you get very similar on a Smart phone these days. However I think it’d make a fairly decent game for anybody that likes an increasing pace of game play.

It makes you think, do you repair you well first to stop your people from going thirsty, or do you repair the houses to keep the taxes coming in? I found that I was struggling to sometimes keep up with all the little pop-ups telling me things needed doing. I often made my happiness drop due to lack of water, after not noticing my well had broken…

In any case, Fate of the Pharaoh isn’t what you’d call a mainstream game, and probably not one for game enthusiasts – more so for the casual gamer that likes to sit back once in a while and have a quick go of something to relax. With the system requirements being so low, this game will happily install on laptops and notebooks. This could be the perfect little game to take out and about with you if on a long journey.

Final things to note is that there’s no multiplayer to this game. As frankly I don’t see a way of incorporating it anyway. Then there’s the replay factor. Near on nil. I don’t see myself playing through it again.

Quick Loading, Easy to grasp and plenty of levels to keep you going for a while. Just don’t be fooled, this game is not like the game by Sierra, Pharaoh.