5/10 A simplified Rome Total War-like strategy with turn-based battles
Good:
- the idea of making battles turn-based is great!
- free
So-so:
- okay-ish 3D-rendered images of units in the info panel
- a greatly simplified economy system (compared to games from Total War series). All you have here is gold and troops. To get more gold, you build marketplaces, watermills and mirror-makers of increasing tiers. Then you build several types of "barracks", each unlocking more unit types. There is no population growth, no happiness system, no sanitation/squalor system etc. That's because this game was designed for mobile first. Oh, and no city sieges or defenses
Bad:
- graphics are pretty much terrible overall, even for a free game, even for 2015, even for an indie game. I guess the whole game was made by just 1 guy, and he is a programmer maybe with a little bit of skill with Photoshop. But he is obviously not an artist. There are ugly red circular buttons that get stretched to ovals in some cases. Everything is pixelated, but in an unpleasant way (so the game wouldn't pass for "pixel art"). There are shades behind headers (which are in yellow font), with a too big offset from the text, making it harder to read. These shades are blurred while the text has sharp contour. Minor details like this indicate that the dev simply lacks artistic taste at all - like most programmers. He should have hired an artist. Or maybe chosen a setting that's simply less demanding to graphics! Fantasy is a setting that has to have good aesthetics. Maybe sci-fi would work better
- the font is hard to read. E.g. the 'w' letter looks confusing. And the capital letters are downright unreadable. Dunno, maybe it's because I'm not a native speaker of English and my native language doesn't even use Latin letters. Still, it's a pretty horrible font that shouldn't be used in games
- music is just 2 tracks - one for the strategic map, and one for the combat. They're both pretty terrible and sound like MIDI files, and I guess were written by the dev, too. They are boring to listen to and get repetitive after a few minutes already
- the whole tutorial is voiced, unprofessionally (probably by the dev himself as well?). Though it's not "very bad", just "below average" (I've seen indie games with worse voice-overs). When the narrator is talking, there are sharp jumps in volume of the music. It should have been more gradual
- there seems to be a huge imbalance in units. Archers do insane damage and fire across the whole battlefield. At the same time, infantry takes 5-6 turns to reach them. An archer can probably kill 3 enemy infantry units without taking any damage. They even wipe out cavalry. The archers have roughly the same price as other units though.
- the UI and the control in battles is as rough as it gets. The game would need playtesting to iron those things out
Overall, it seems like a "labor of love" project of some programmer who was fond of the Total War series and wanted to see it with TBS battles and on mobile. I think I even saw a video about this game back in 2013 or so, and was excited about it, but then couldn't find the game itself on Android. Maybe it was another game, I dunno. Anyways, here it is, roughly the same idea, and despite the obvious amount of work that went into it, it fails just about in everything. The bad gfx and music demotivate you to play after you're done with the tutorial. You force yourself to give this game a chance. And find the obvious, extreme imbalance with the ranged units. Also that the economy is extremely basic - and it's over. The funny thing, the starting screen says "version 12.3" or something. So, after so many updates it's still like this?
Picking a sci-fi or minimalistic setting could save this project. Also maybe hiring a proper artist and/or using stock assets, I dunno, from Unity Asset Store instead of the amateurish self-made stuff... It's kinda sad for me to see the great idea of Medieval Total War with TBS battles go to waste like this.
Anyway, I'd give this game a 4/10 since technically it's playable and even had an interesting core idea in it. But since it's free, it's +1 and equals 5/10. Which would be a "neutral" vote. But since there is no neutral vote on Steam, it's a "tentative upvote".
Btw not sure what it is, but Steam shows this game as still running after you quit it. I had to re-start Steam to be able to write a review.
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