Battle Nations

Battle Nations! It's back! Sort of. The good: The game has a lot of heart. The characters are fun! The quests are flavorful and keep you doing things while you play. The dialogue is often witty and charming. The art style is endearing. And, for a base builder game, the game gives you (albeit, slowly) enough premium currency that you won't need to buy premium currency as long as you budget and only use what you are given sparingly. The bad (and why I wouldn't recommend it): This is not a new game. If you played this game back when it first released, you will probably enjoy it for a bit. However, there was very little effort put into porting this to PC with all the QOL changes that we expect. It plays exactly how it did on the iPad. Nothing but point and click. Esc does nothing. Right click does nothing. There are no hotkeys, no support for PC. When you level up units, the bonuses are cut off because the game was not made for PC. For all intents and purposes, it is not a PC game, it is an iPad game you play on your PC. On top of this, the game has been out for some time now, and while the devs are adding new stuff (naval warfare), they have yet to fix core parts of the game. There is an entire tab for building "Decorations". In Battle Nations, Decorations are not just cosmetic. They give your buildings stat bonuses (think: being near a road makes a building more productive). There are TONS of decorations which give stat bonuses, and essentially, they are behind all of the city building in the game. At the current moment, none of these decorations work, which essentially means that there is zero reason to build a city, as opposed to a random jumble of buildings. While this isn't the worst thing in the world, it basically removes all aspects of city building in the game. Another major issue is getting bottlenecked on resources. You get bottlenecked on population consistently. Early on, you will get bottlenecked on iron and the only way to get past it is to beeline towards iron deposits over the course of a week or so (each expansion takes a day), or to pay real money. You have resource caps, which would be fine, but a tiny increase in your resource cap costs you perhaps a tenth of your population (unless you spend real money to buy the better buildings of course!). This stopped me in my tracks for WEEKS until I finally broke and used a premium resource. Then, there is the combat issue, and the bottlenecks that arise from your units dying. There really isn't much strategy, you just choose who your minions attack, and the opponent more or less randomly attacks one of yours. It is essentially up to random chance whether you lose your most expensive units. These units will then bottleneck you, as you can't win the later battles without them, but winning those battles will cost you tens of thousands of gold in hospital bills and thousands of iron, while only gaining you a few thousand gold for a win (and sometimes only a few hundred). I don't hate this system, as it forces you to use your worse units, but I really wish that the penalty for units dying, which again is essentially up to random chance, was not so high. I often find myself retreating and retrying battles after the AI randomly chooses to deal 75% of one of my expensive unit's HP. This is bad game design. Also, why the ♥♥♥♥ does the Dust Walker Raider unit, who just has two knives and a thrift-store cloak, have a full range attack that insta-kills everything? What world of unreality do you live in, devs? Tldr: it's not a PC game, it's an iPad game that I would only recommend for nostalgia purposes.