This game is an unusual mix of turn-based strategy/resource management and real-time battles. Unfortunately, the game isn’t very polished. The first time I played it crashed after 45 minutes, and thereafter it wouldn’t start any more, even after rebooting. This is after installing the “2.0” patch from the designer’s website.
The turn-based game is fairly complex, with lots of resource management decisions to make and armies to supply and train. To get you started there is a set of text-heavy in-game tutorials, but these are fairly buggy, and often whatever trigger is meant to move you on to the next part of the tutorial is not activated until after a lot of fairly random clicking. In the end I had to give up on the tutorials because eventually I could not get it to progress no matter what I clicked. There is also a ~50 page manual you can read if the tutorials don’t do it for you.
The graphics are reasonable – certainly good enough that they don’t get in the way of the game, but like most of the game they also lack polish. The interface is reasonable – except that some decisions (such as ending a turn or razing your own village) can be made with just one mistaken click, with no way to undo or cancel.
The real-time part of the game is a mixture of strategic decision making, and fast clicking. For instance, some units, like the archers, only attack when you click on an enemy. The strategic part appears to hinge on placing your troops such that no arm to arm units get close enough to hurt your archers, though I didn’t play enough to plumb the real depths. If you don’t like the real-time aspect, apparently you can tell the game to calculate the result of the battle for you, reverting the game to a pure turn-based mechanic.
In the end the game was just too buggy to be worth investigating further. The lack of polish suggests that even if you could deal with the bugs it wouldn’t be that rewarding. I feel embarrassed writing a review after just 45 minutes of playing, but short of reinstalling I couldn’t get the game to run a second time.
