Desert Ashes

worst game on the planet - whatever resolution you choose, you have to scroll in all directions all the Time because Screen is not fitting - multiplayer matchmaking does not function well. sessions get stuck before starting and you have severall sessions open which you cant close - graphics 0/10 DONT BUY THIS EVEN ON 90% SALE. ITS JUST SPAMMING YOUR DISC !!!

Like the evil, amateurish twin of Advance Wars. At the core, it's a decent game, but it has a couple of hickups; -HUD-placement - it gets in the way, way too often! -Saves cursor-placement when you exit a menu, often making you choose "dismiss" or "sell" when you REALLY didn't mean to! -Enemy unit-type isn't visible (is it infantry? is it heavy?), which make the initial stages a pain. -Some issues when logging in, requiring you to reboot the game and try again. -AI is bonkers stupid most of the time. If you've played and finished Advance Wars, you should find this game a breeze. -Most sound & music is lackluster And then there's the good stuff: +Graphics while not beautiful do a pretty decent job. I especially enjoyed the character and sprite designs! +Playing as both sides is a nice change of pace +Multiplayer works pretty well when I figured it out, and it's pretty fun! Overall, the pluses aren't enough to support a purchase and get this game a recommendation from me, but if you have a 70-something percent off-chance, I'd give it a go nonetheless. Especially if you have that turn-based-strategy-itch to scratch.

This garbage freezes whenever i enter a skirmish. trying to access the menus to do anything during the game starts a seperate game which then freezes and crashes the entire thing. i had to relaunch the game no less than 8 times to accumulate the 5 minutes of gameplay I needed to review this garbage and warn you guys. Not worth it for any price.

I played the first campaign (which is in fact a tutorial) and a skirmish, in my time with the game I had some issues with the user interface, it seems better suited for a touch device (one with a small screen, in my monitor the buttons are huge). In the campaign the AI is competent but not a challenge, in the skirmish I got beated with no effort (maybe it was the difficulty setting, maybe the map, I don't know). The main problem I found is that there can be too many units on each side, and the AI it's does not play fast, so you can spend a lot of time waiting for your turn. Something similar happened with the Banner Saga, but there was a story to follow and a bunch of characters with names, faces and personalities presented to you from the very beginning (I read that there's also a story in this game, but after finishing the tutorial I got a The End sceen and couldn't advance beyond that, then was when I played the skirmish). I may try to play the rest of the campaign, but after the first chapter I feel no interest in the story, I don't know who they are or why are they fighting, so the only reason to keep playing would be the game mechanics and the game has a competent design but is too slow paced, I found a setting to avoid watching the battles but I don't know if there's a way to skip the enemy's turn or something like that.

A reasonably well designed turned based strategy game with functional graphics, but presumably always going to suffer from a limited audience, especially with the current multiplayer slowness. Generally the game plays quite well - you have an introductory/tutorial campaign that is fairly quick to play through and explains how to play. Then you have two shortish single player campaigns, playing as each of the two factions in the game, where the maps are reasonably diverse and the AI is kind of okay enough to make you pay attention to what you are doing, although it is not hard to beat all of the missions. Still I don't think there isn't really enough content in the single player campaigns, or the skirmishes that would really capture your attention for long, they are more an introduction/practice venue. The game is pretty well balanced - all the unit types have their benefits and weaknesses, and nothing clearly is always the best thing to build (although on certain large open water maps the long range sea units are hard to beat if you have a few, and unlike the land artillery there is no way to use the cheap unit swarming countermeasure to overrun them for most of the day). Both sides have the same units with different names/graphics, so the sides are implicitly balanced. The freezing of water at night adds an extra angle on some maps - what was a deadlock and chokepointed map can suddenly spring wide open, or as mentioned suddenly your dominating whale artillery squadron is suddenly immobile and vulnerable. As mentioned above you have to pay attention - the mechanics of buying units which then can't move or attack until the next turn means that if you start losing ground or end up short of units one turn then the opponent is probably going to stomp all over you very fast. This means you don't get long drawn out defensive rearguard actions slowing the end stages of the game, but also that you have to watch what you are doing - retreating your artillery a space or two before firing, or spawning a unit at a different factory so they are out of range of attackers, can be all the difference between winning and losing. Or using the nearest unit to attack rather than one moving up from the back so you leave the more forward one to capture a building, or attack the next unit further back which your other unit can't reach, etc. The game menu UI is a little bit idiosyncratic (presumably designed for mobile devices), but usuable enough, and the in game UI is easy enough to use, with the odd exception where you want to move a unit in the corner of the map that is sitting under part of the UI, and dragging the screen to show the unit doesn't help as it snaps back and recentres before you can click on the unit. Checking your opponents movement/attack ranges in their next turn is also fairly easy/intuitive. However unlike, say, Hero Academy your moves play out immediately and there is no undo, so you can't experiment and work out an optimal strategy by trial and error, but there are far few variables in Desert Ashes so once you have experience this probably won't be a big loss...most of the time, until you start attack and suddenly realise there was a better option/order of doing things. On the other hand this does make for a more live/raw feel for the game when you can't just unkill a bunch of units and try something different as often as you like. The multiplayer set up seems fine - you can set maximum turn lengths to suit how you want to play (24 hour limits for a more play by email type game, or 5 minutes if you want to play "live"), and you can play multiple games at once where appropriate, which is simple enough as you just exit one game, drag up and down the list if needed, and "zoom" into the other game to switch over, all fairly seamless and easy to use. Logging in seems to work from the Steam account, so no mucking about there, although there are sometimes connection issues with the login server it has always been pretty temporary for us. Creating new games is also fairly straightforward, picking either random internet people or friends as appropriate (although it doesn't filter to friends that have the game), and you have a few mildly different game types to try out. So all that seems great so far - and up to this point it would be a definite recommendation for the sort of people that like these sorts of games. So the two core problems - lack of pickup multiplayer opponents (or at least ones that actually take a turn), which might not be a blocking issue for people who aren't reliant on pickup online gaming, and the regular and long lag to process turns. While some of the time (when playing inside the same room) we have had games where turns get processed and sent to the other person within a few seconds, most of the time we have tried to play it takes somewhere from a few minutes to sometimes maybe 10 minutes for a turn to start appearing on the other persons system - and even then it then takes 10-30 seconds per move the opponent made. So if you plan on playing people you know in 24 hour PBeM style games this might suit you. Otherwise, currently, it probably won't.

Pro: Day/Night system Single / multi player Steam achieves cards Not broken controls Looks good Con: Stupid AI Grindy and boring Low cost Weird: The save game / clone thing Overall: I want to like this game. I should like this game. I just don't like this game.

Must correct my review. Thought this would be some early-access-Game, but for a "finished" one the quality is to low. First of all: I like the game. ...beside the bugs. The grafics are very cool. But the rest... Sure good as an mobile app, but on PC it could be a bit more ...fine. The menue is in the way sometimes (only optically. you still can guess where the unit is ans click it). The shops sometimes simply are disabled. The animations are too slow and the texts could need some refinement too, here and there. Its nice to play from time to time, but dont invest much in it.

Fun but buggy strategy game with shallow mechanics, poor UI and weak story

нет

Sorry but so bad