My small Egyptian empire flourishes on the Mediterranean coast. We have conquered nearby towns and constructed temples to Ra. In the south, our stone mines produce the materials necessary to upgrade our settlements, while our allies꧂ to the far sou🐻th keep us stocked with gold in exchange for wood. The court is settled and the Pharaoh’s throne is relatively secure.

Creative Assembly Sofia’s rendition of Ancient Egypt during the Late Bronze Age Collapse is wonderfully stylized: sk🐎etched clouds roll across the blue sky, like hieroglyphics; battles sprawl out over rolling sand dunes, and aggressive marauding Sea People lay ruin to the splendors of Ancient Egypt. Total War: Pharaoh is a quintessential Total War game, if plagued with some of the same problems that seem to have lingered in the series for several iterations.

Total War: Pharaoh’s campaign takes place over a time in history where human civilization went through a period of great upheaval and change between 1200 and 1150 BC. You have to deal with the challenges this presents, of which the Sea People are the most obvious. I already wrote about why I thought the Sea People were the coolest part of ﷺPharaoh in my Gamescom preview, and it’s fantastic to see this fascinating part of history re☂alized in the full game.

After a few turns in the campaign, the Sea People have a chance to be triggered. They land along the coast - either in your territory or elsewhere - and make their way across the landscape, attacking armies, sieging cities, and razing your outposts. It reminds me a lot of the hordes of Mongol invaders in Medieval 🎉Total War 2. The ferocity of the invading Sea Peoples grows more intense as the game progresses, and it adds an interesting dynamic to the campaign–do you wait and hold off on your invasion of a neighbor in fear of getting attacked from the sea, or prepare a solid line of defense to repel the raiders?

There’s a lot to love about the campaign in general, too. The court dynamics are pretty straightforward (this isn’t Crusader Kings 3), but it’s a nice addition to have your character feel like they play a part in the larger story. You can generate intrigue, plan plots against your rivals, and eventually become Pharaoh yourself. Resources are generated in different regions, and you’ll need all the resources to have a complete empire–this means you need to prioritize attacking and conquering certain areas, whether that be to improve your gold generation or get a hold of your first🌸 stone quarry.

The win conditions for Pharaoh also completely change the endgame: rather than just stacking units and deleting the AI opponents, you can win with different conditions - like religion, for example. This is the first time I’ve played a Total War game and completed a campaign, and that’s with 600 hours in Rome: Total War 2. Having more options on how you want to finish your game is massive for this. Later, once you’ve completed your first major campaigns, I’d recommend experimenting with some of the Civilization-like campaign settings that allow you to tweak AI spawn locations and other factors. It’s refreshing to see a TW game🌟 with this sort of customization available.

As compelling as the Sea People are, it’s during their in💦vasion that some of the cracks begin to show. In terms of pure performance, the game begins to tank during these invasion waves. I run a high-end PC and didn’t expect to have any performance issues on Pharaoh’s campaign map, so the minor stuttering between the end of turns was a bit of a surprise. During some battles the frame rate also drops pretty significantly, but that’s always at least a little expected when you’re dealing with thousands of individual units. Overall, though, t⭕hese were minor frustrations and more than likely to be patched or resolved with driver updates.

What’s more problematic than the performance ꦰproblems is the AI pathing. During my Rameses campaign the first few waves of Sea Peoples attacked so Ashkelon, the neighboring civilization, sent stacks of armies to clear out the raiders even though the battles were taking place huge leagues away from their towns. This is all well and good, but that meant when the Sea Peoples then attacked Ashkelon a few turns later, all of their armies were too far away to do anything. The AI should be capable of prioritizing its defense properly rather t𒆙han blindly chasing the raiding armies across the map if Pharaoh is to be a step up.

Likewise, AI pathing is still a problem in battles. I’m certain this has been an ongoing𒁃 issue in Total War games since Rome: Total War 20 years ago. In Pharaoh, it’s the archers that mostly cause the problems–they just don’t seem to fire their arrows. This is particularly annoying because the archers can be so devastating when they work properly, but they don’t work well very often. It seems like a pathfinding issue, because when I spam-click attack the archers will readjust constantly trying to find an angle to take a shot. These pathfinding problems also extend to other units - often they won’t move completely to a location and you’ll need to repeatedly click to get them to do anything. It’s very frustrating, and quite a shame, because there are elements of the battles that I think are fantastic.

One of my main concerns was that a lot of the battlefields would be similar to each other, but the diversity of landscapes and dynamic terrain mean that most encounters feel unique. There’s nothing quite like seeing 200 chariots dash down a sand dune (although I’m not 100 percent sure how historically accurate that is) and then a sandstorm whips up a few moments later. Positioning your armies to overlook a boggy marsh, hoping that the enemy's heavily armored troops get stuck in the mud, is also extremely satisfying. It makes you feel like a genius battle commander, which is really what Total War games are all about.

The satisfac🧔tion of the grand battles also comes from the attention to detail and love that has been put into faction and unit design. A lot of what we know about this period of history is based on physical archaeology and research, but there is a lot we don’t know. When ꦓI spoke with associate game director Todor Nikolov at Gamescom, he told me that the team read a lot of books about Egyptian armies, the Sea Peoples, and writings about what the world would’ve looked like at the time. They’ve done an excellent job of bringing this sometimes hard to understand period of history to life.

Overall, despite its shortcomings with performance and AI pathing, Total War: Pharaoh has been one of the most enjoyable Total War games I’ve played for quite some time. Its refined focus on a smaller period of history has allowed for experimentation elsewhere, with dynamic weather and terrain, resource generation on the campaign map, and a wave-based invasion system with the Sea Peoples that constantly keeps you guessing. I hope that someඣ of these mechanics can be taken and expanded on for future, main series releases for Total War.

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