Of all the games that I thought that I would review again, Total War: Pharaoh was not one of them. When I reviewed it, I gave the game a 7.5/10, which was almost on par with other critics’ scores and a bit high compared to user scores on Metacritic. While the game was certainly interesting in certain aspects, it never quite gave me the same joy that Rome: Total War or Total War: Medieval II. I could never quite figure out why, but when the developers came around and asked me to take a look at their brand-new expansion called Dynasties, I thought this could be a great moment to see the improvements in the game. That proved to be a tad bit difficult at first. 

The initial reason is that the game refused to load properly on my computer. At first, I thought it might’ve just been a faulty file or something wrong with my computer. I quickly realized after going through all the checks that the game was actually the problem. This caused me to be greatly confused since this was the first time that a review game didn’t run. Initially, it seemed like the next step was to just write an article about the new additions to the game, but luckily things took a turn for the better once the developers released a patch that allowed the game to run.

Now, I could review the game with all its new goodies. Things still were a bit rocky from time to time with a variety of weird bugs popping up. Eventually, things smoothed out, but I have no idea why these bugs appeared after the update. Luckily, it seems like I am one of the few people who experienced some of these problems since most of the other player reviews indicated that there weren’t too many major bugs that they were running into.

Regardless, let’s hop into what they have added to the game. The map has been greatly expanded, and the number of playable factions has seemingly doubled. Mesopotamia and the Aegean have been added with playable factions that add a bit more spice to the game. My favorite thing they have added is the ability to play as minor factions within various lands. Whenever I played the other Total War games, I was always fascinated by the rebels and wished they had more of an identity. Dynasties finally provides an identity to those cities and towns that the major factions are supposed to steamroll at the beginning of the game. While these factions are a lot weaker than the major powers, it sets up some interesting situations that are great for veteran Total War players.

They have changed up dynasties by bringing family trees and killable faction leaders into the game. The fact that this wasn’t in the original game kind of blows me away since it wasn’t something I even thought about checking for. Seeing it in this new expansion gives the game more inherent risk than it had before and brings it closer in line with some of the entries in the Total War franchise that I am familiar with. Sadly there is no new animation or animation dialogue that is given for the other factions, the same one from the original is still there that helps to set up the overall tone of the world’s situation.

One of the things that seems odd about this game is the fact that the Dynasties expansion is made as its own separate game rather than a DLC that you can access through the original game. If you don’t like the new expansion and like the original game better, you can simply only have the regular game installed. This setup reminds me of the original Rome Total War game where the Alexander expansion was its own separate game.

This all being said, what are my overall thoughts on the game? I don’t think that this expansion does enough to warrant its bloated hard drive space. While 80 GB is by no means a big game considering the absolute behemoths that exist today that are cracking the 200 GB ceiling, there are no quality improvements that I noticed to warrant the game doubling in size. However, this is still a solid game and is a decent way to bring people back to Total War: Pharaoh. If you have been waiting to try out this game, now is the perfect time! If you want to get a more in-depth look at the original game that this expansion adds, click here to check out my original review.

A PC review copy of Total War: PHARAOH DYNASTIES was provided by SEGA for this review.

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Total War: Pharaoh Dynasties

39.99

8.5

Score

8.5/10

Pros

• A ton of new content

Cons

• Some unusual bugs