Forge of Empires

Forge of Empires Full Review

The Start of a New Age

At the start of the game, you are given a plot of land to build on.  The tutorial takes you through the menus and shows your options of building types. Along with showing you how to build, the tutorial shows how to research to unlock more building options.  An interesting feature of this game is the ability to move and sell buildings.  Most games allow to ability to sell buildings, but this game gives players more freedom in city planning by giving the option to move buildings.

Beginning the game, the focus is to collect resources in order to construct buildings that generate resources. The Huts and Stilt Houses, provide your growing city with population and coin. Pottery and Hunter buildings create items that provide you with building points. Generating resources requires a great amount of time and attention. To collect any resource, you have to be present, and collect the resource from each building once they have been produced.  If you wait too long to collect a resource, they can spoil, and the time you spend producing the items has gone to waste.

The only resource that collects on its own, are the forge points.  These points are generated every hour, with a storage limit of 10 points.  Forge points are used to research in the research tree.  Depending on what is being researched, options usually take 3-5 forge points.

Scout’s Honor

While there are PvP duels, once the option has been unlocked, the focus of the game is the single-player campaign.  You play as growing empire, scouting new land, battling other cities, conquering provinces, and gaining resources.  With a strong storyline lacking, the ability to invest time is tough. Other than, “You need to expand your empire! Acquire more land”, the objective of the game is straightforward.

To expand into other provinces, you will need to aid of scouting unit.  Not really a unit you own, but an option you pay coin to use each time you need to scout. Once a section of land has been scouted, you’re given the ability to attack segments of the province.

Using the buildings in your city, such as the Spearfighter Barracks and Slingers Range, you train troops to create an army.  Even with being at a beginning age, the starting troops such as the Spearfighters are very effective.  Combating a province, with troops varying different research ages, the Spearfighters were able to defeat units that require higher levels of research to produce.  The combat is turn based, on a hexagonal grid system, with automatic combat.  Other than choosing what enemy units to attack, your choices in combat are limited.

Once you defeated a segment of the province, you’ll receive resources as a reward.  Moving onto the next segment of the province and so forth, until you have taken control of the providence.

Whoooa! Hold Your Horses!

From when you start the game, to when you conquer your first providence; the game play goes by fairly quickly.  From that point forward, the game play becomes sluggish.  Accumulating enough resources to further advance yourself on the research tree, and to expand your city becomes a huge hassle.  As mentioned earlier, because you have to be in game to collect your generating resources, as you progress, the time you have to spend in the game exponentially grows.

Final Verdict: Fair

This game does offer some unique features not seen in other MMO browser games, such as the single-player campaign, and the ability to move buildings.  The time spent collecting resources outweighs most of the enjoyable gameplay, and creates a tedious experience.  Although, it markets itself as a MMO, the focus of Forge of Empires is on single-player.  The PvP is limited, there are features such as messaging and a market place, but the interaction with other people ends there.  There is potential for this to become an interesting and addicting game, but it hasn’t quite reached that moment yet.

Forge of Empires Screenshots

12►

Forge of Empires Links

Official Game Page