Age of War is the kind of simple strategy/RPG hybrid you mainly find on phones: no base-building, no resource-management and no real story to speak of, besides the text in each faction’s select screen. There is just battle between two castles sending out troops, money earned at each victory and there are cooldowns after building any unit (which grow longer the more powerful it is) to prevent simple spamming. I suppose you could also call it a tower defence game with mobile towers and a stronghold to destroy, if that makes any sense.
Firstly, you’re the only one in the game allowed to attack on the Risk-style map, and the only way to lose is to run out of armies to attack with. While that is obviously unrealistic and removes any joy you might have in seeing AIs fight against each other, it is somewhat of a necessary evil given the game’s low price: making sure that they don’t off each other too quickly or gang up on the player takes programming man-hours, and the current arrangement cuts down on the Fake Longevity as you don’t need to fight over the same territories again, and face each faction and their unique units several times, rather than forced to fight the most dominant faction 70% of the time.
The actual process is fun, I guess. The graphics and sound are nice, with all units looking quite different from each other and the sound and animation quality is reasonable. The enemies always have all their units, and the difficulty curve is managed by making AI easy at the beginning hard later on. It’s not perfectly managed but it ensures that you pay attention to the Tactical Rock-Paper-Scissors, as there is no knowing what combination of enemies next level will throw at you. You also never have enough gold to have everything unlocked, making for some tantalising decisions regarding your investments.
Unfortunately, the subsequent playthroughs lack the same energy, as 7 factions are not very different. Out of 9 units available, between 4 to 6 of them (swordsmen, archers, spearmen, axemen, wizards and catapults) are same as everyone else’s, meaning the first half of the replay quickly gets monotonous. There are some exceptions (like orcs having the best archers. Eat it, elves!), but not enough. It also doesn’t help that the ending screen is the same for all factions. Overall, it's not a bad game, but it had the potential to be much better. 5/10
Good on the first try, but loses steam later.
Age of War is the kind of simple strategy/RPG hybrid you mainly find on phones: no base-building, no resource-management and no real story to speak of, besides the text in each faction’s select screen. There is just battle between two castles sending out troops, money earned at each victory and there are cooldowns after building any unit (which grow longer the more powerful it is) to prevent simple spamming. I suppose you could also call it a tower defence game with mobile towers and a stronghold to destroy, if that makes any sense.
Firstly, you’re the only one in the game allowed to attack on the Risk-style map, and the only way to lose is to run out of armies to attack with. While that is obviously unrealistic and removes any joy you might have in seeing AIs fight against each other, it is somewhat of a necessary evil given the game’s low price: making sure that they don’t off each other too quickly or gang up on the player takes programming man-hours, and the current arrangement cuts down on the Fake Longevity as you don’t need to fight over the same territories again, and face each faction and their unique units several times, rather than forced to fight the most dominant faction 70% of the time.
The actual process is fun, I guess. The graphics and sound are nice, with all units looking quite different from each other and the sound and animation quality is reasonable. The enemies always have all their units, and the difficulty curve is managed by making AI easy at the beginning hard later on. It’s not perfectly managed but it ensures that you pay attention to the Tactical Rock-Paper-Scissors, as there is no knowing what combination of enemies next level will throw at you. You also never have enough gold to have everything unlocked, making for some tantalising decisions regarding your investments.
Unfortunately, the subsequent playthroughs lack the same energy, as 7 factions are not very different. Out of 9 units available, between 4 to 6 of them (swordsmen, archers, spearmen, axemen, wizards and catapults) are same as everyone else’s, meaning the first half of the replay quickly gets monotonous. There are some exceptions (like orcs having the best archers. Eat it, elves!), but not enough. It also doesn’t help that the ending screen is the same for all factions. Overall, it's not a bad game, but it had the potential to be much better. 5/10