Cheap Egypt: Tomb of the Pharaoh (Software) (Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me) Price

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Customer Reviews of Egypt: Tomb of the Pharaoh

Annoying flaws and failing plot
In "Egypt 1156 B.C. - Tomb of the Pharaoh" you play the role of Ramoses, an Egyptian youth whose father is wrongly accused of raiding the Pharaoh's tomb. You have three days to prove his innocence.

"Egypt 1156" is actually an edutainment title. You can click on various objects which will lead you to an encyclopedia reference. The game also weaves ancient Egyptian culture into the puzzles. There is even a part in which you get to play Senet, an ancient board game.

At first this game seemed pretty good. Most puzzles, although easy, were logical. The graphics were beautiful (although less stunning than today's adventure games), and the game was very stable (no crashes). The interface is very easy to learn. Most of the time you need only to point and click to move. Dialog is handled with a multiple choice-style set of responses. You need only to select the desired response and enter.

After a little while, however, I began to notice numerous flaws, most of which merely annoying. A lot of them could be overlooked depending on how interested you are in adventure games. The music, for example, was good, but was one of those endless loop recordings that began to drive me crazy. I shut it off. The male characters all seemed to be twins, as I couldn't tell one from the other. I couldn't skip past dialog, so if there were several things to ask a character about, I had to listen to the same introductory dialog several times. Several of the scenes were so dark I had to grope around, looking to see if the cursor changed to see if I could do anything. The cursor would change if you could interact with people/objects, but would only change if you moused over a certain part of the object (for example, it only would change if I put the cursor over the upper half of a person, not the lower half). There were typos in the dialog subtitles.

Then a major flaw. The game is divided in to several acts, each taking place in a different location. Once you move on to the next location, however, you can't go back to an earlier one. You have to go back to an earlier save and repeat whatever happened since then. You can die, by the way, so save often.

Finally the plotline fell apart for me. Maybe it was the unfamiliar Egyptian names, which made it hard for me to remember who was connected to what. But in any case, I failed to see why certain objects would implicate certain people were guilty, and I no longer knew why I doing certain things. The only reason I was able to finish the game was that certain characters told you what to do or understanding of the entire plotline wasn't necessary to solve certain puzzles. You don't need to figure out, for instance, that you should find a way to stop aiming arrows at you so the character won't die. At this point I lost interest in the game.

I wouldn't recommend "Egypt 1156 B.C." to most people. There are three classes of people that might enjoy it. The first would be die-hard, nondiscriminating adventure gamers. (The game is, by the way, very linear, for those of you who hate that.) The second would be junior high schoolers (I say junior high schoolers because the game is very easy) who need or want to learn something about ancient Egypt. Lastly, Egyptologists might enjoy it. Otherwise I'd pass; it wouldn't be that hard to find a more worthwhile title.

Good concept, bad game
I was really looking forward to playing this game since I'm an Egyptology buff. The graphics aren't too bad--some are even spectacular--but the gameplay is frustrating. I had to play one section over and over because I didn't accumulate items in the correct order. There are a couple of items that don't appear to have any purpose at all. Maybe they do, but I was able to get through the game without using them. I was also disappointed that the game didn't venture into all of the places on the map. Why are they there?

High points were the Senet game and the information about items, gods, and every day life of ancient Egypt.

Low points were the character graphics (ugly and mechanical), difficulty picking up items and replaying sections over and over.

My own pet peeve...the subtitles contain spelling errors and don't always match what is spoken. Sloppy editing, Dreamcatcher!!! However, they did manage to fit "perspicacity" into the script--twice (for whatever that's worth).

Overall, the educational aspects of the game are fun and interesting, but the gameplay is blah.