Imperi

TL;DR Imperi is an hour's worth of casual click-strategy and definitely worth the ninety-nine cent price tag. You play as a Romanesque governor, sent to some minor province to help make it flourish. The mechanics are simple: Every season (Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter) you must choose how to spend three actions. These actions include recruiting soldiers, fighting for more land (and thus the potential for a higher population), taxing your population, planting crops, and purchasing grain. Short and simple, the text-based interface is intuitive and it makes for some fun. Overall, I get the feeling that this is a first attempt in a long learning process, and that Nuts and Volts could definitely be on the path to releasing more complex games in the future.

The game feels like an Indie Developers first try at developing a functional game, and in that respect they've succeeded. Imperi isn't a long game, in fact it's terribly short. If you're a Core Gamer who is used to deep strategy games, you'll soon find yourself mastering Imperi, and then immediately getting bored with it. It got to the point where I was speeding through the seasons at about 2-3 seconds a season, roughly 9-10 seconds a year. I was actually expecting my Dictator character to die of old age, but they never did. I quickly gained Achievement after Achievement until it soon felt like I was being spammed by them. The immortal dictator feels a lot like a broken mechanic, as by the time I set my mind to actually trying to finish the game I'd obtained a ludicrously high score. Outside of having a set end date for the game, it could incorporate a negitive score modifer the longer the game lasts. To potential buyers, whether or not you choose to rush through the game like I did, you're likely only looking at an hour or two worth of gameplay time to both finish the game and score all it's Achievements. And your motives for buying this game should be because you want some easy Achievements, and/or because you want to support an Indie Developer. There's just not enough game here for it to stand on it's own merits.

Wow! What a game! No options to change resolution... Horrible with 4k and then all so tiny... First screen white letters on grey background... Combined with resolution ==> no idea what was written there... Then game itself. Three (3) things to do per season. Plant, tax, fight. Repeat till no more free soldiers. Plant, tax, recruit. If people are unhappy you tax them, make one season break. Plant, fight, end. Yes, it is cheap, but still not worth even this little amount of money... Sad, because the idea was nice. 9 achievements in 7 minutes...

simply not enough here to warrant any price other than free.

It's a casual turn-based strategy game about managing a Roman province. Visual style is adorable. But the very first screen after pressing start is a light-grey wall with white text on it - a tad hard to read. [h1]Then starts the game[/h1] Every season you have 3 moves, which can be used to buy or plant crops, hire or use troops, or tax residents. If the province ever runs out of people (due to famine, excessive taxing etc.) you lose. All people eat, and soldiers need wages every season. You need enough soldiers, resources and territory to raise in ranks. Simple enough? [h1]Barebones gameplay[/h1] Everything is simulated with the click of a button. There's very little to influence the outcome of the battles or how well your crops turn out: the game may be thrown because of bad luck losing the whole harvest twice in a row unless you save-scum (or save gold for multiple grain purchases). Frankly, it quickly becomes boring too. It's simple enough that the only important numbers are the crops and gold, so you know when to adjust the base gameplay loop. Even the sound track is not very fitting: it's a string track with very hard sounds. For a casual game like this, I'd expect something gentle and calm instead. [h1]Conclusions[/h1] The whole gameplay has been experienced in a single year (i.e. 4 season-turns). Achievements 100% takes a bit longer, about an hour (or 1.5h for me as I missed one before I suddenly and unexpectedly "won" and had to play it again). It's inexpensive, especially on sale. But I wouldn't recommend it as a game, as it's simply not that [i]engaging[/i]. [url=http://store.steampowered.com/curator/9997062/]~Twistorian Curator~[/url]

Imperi is a Java based browser app that seems to have been dumped on Steam as a paid product (unclear why... unethical behaviour? Or a dev who generally thinks Steam is for Java browser apps?). This is a really bad text based number/RNG survival game where you run a kingdom and allocate your resources on planting food, hiring soldiers etc, then hitting the end turn button to see what RNG events drain your resources. These games have been around for a while, so I can't really say this is just a lame ripoff of Dead in Bermuda, rather, Dead in Bermuda is another me-too in that old, dead gaming genre. But if it helps you to think of this as a bad ripoff of Dead in Bermuda, it will help to understand why nobody should buy this Java based "I can't believe this isn't a browser game" trashware. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. The artwork here, what little of it there is, is terrible, it's a hodge-podge of amateurish "My First Wacom Tablet" style drawings used instead professional looking game assets. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget to arrange someone who can create graphical assets properly, or lack of talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low, enough on its own to deter gamers. The game interface is mostly just text boxes/dialogs and features mostly static, barely animated 2D images, the kind of thing you expect to see in browser/HTML games from the 1990s. While that might be fine for the 1990s, gaming has evolved a lot since then, the ATI Rage became mainstream in 1996... it's 2023, and that kind of thing just won't fly anymore, it's just not visually up to scratch. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. Bewilderingly, the game doesn't include proper audio controls, so you can't turn off the annoying background music, you'll need to alt+tab out and stop the music using the Windows sound mixer. This is obviously not okay and it's unclear why the developers chose not to include this basic feature. The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here. Comically, the game was written in Java (I'm not making this up). Talk about not using the right tools for the job. Might as well try to bake a cake with a screwdriver. The extremely poor choice of game engine here is a major contributing factor to the defects with the game. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. Imperi is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.

Very VERY basic game. Probably good for an hour or two. Worth the buck it costs, not much more. It's good if you're trying to get a bunch of steam accomplishments quickly, but not for much else. Very simple design leaves little to do, and limits on the amount of food you can buy at a time keeps you from being able to scale up your country as well. You get a maximum of 3 actions a turn, which would include things like actually planting food, or taxing your citizens, so you only have so much choice.

strategic games good

Solid game I'll 100% one day

Nice game to kill time.