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| Puzzle combat action! |
Spring is coming. I no longer need reflector and light while going to and returning from work at normal hours. Also the streets are getting free of snow and ice. This makes me puzzled whether I should celebrate the expansion of Zacharian empire on mobile development or just moan for the loss of winter now, but in any case I felt like playing an Android game since a while. The game is Empires & Puzzles by a Finnish game company Small Giant Games. An American company Zynga (known best from Farmville...) is about to buy SGG though, which is probably a great deal for the people working there, but in my humble opinion not that cool overall when seemingly all Finnish companies that reach some success are sold to some giants on the other side of the Globe. Well I guess they need things to make USA great again, since they're not named like Britannia.
Woodlegged jokes aside, the game itself is sort of a mixed genre game, as indicated by the name. And actually I find it very unimaginative to essentially contain game genre in the name, and that is one reason it took me a long time to bother to test it as I was expecting Empires & Puzzles to something considerably boring. It might be helpful for a casual player to find a suitable genre of course, since there are myriads of bad games out there and in most cases a random game is not really worth your time - even worse, if you don't even like the genre(s).
In any case, the core gameplay consists of battles with heroes that are dealt by puzzles - somewhat alike to Fancy Cats or (probably better known) Candy Crush Saga, where you'll need to line up same coloured blocks in order for them to blast off. When they poof, they'll cause damage to the opponent facing the blocks, after which more blocks will appear. The more blocks you'll manage to disappear, the more damage you'll cause, and if you'll make combos of many alignments with one move, there will be growing multipliers for hits.
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| Not even a tight match yet... |
There are many games that are practically all about similar puzzle rolling, but Empires & Puzzles has its flanks supported by light RPG/strategy features, making it more interesting than a standard puzzle game in my eyes. Other parts of the game is building your stronghold and getting heroes (your puzzlefighting troops) stronger. Both parts are quite traditional resource gathering and production and training, with heroes being levelled up by combining with other heroes though (they sort of resemble game cards actually), and in between there are conquest/quest trails to go though with some cliché riddled and mostly meaningless dialogue of non-playable characters.
Even while it's a bit different combination of elements than I've encountered before, I don't see anything particularly original in any of the subelements. General gameplay reminds me much of Dungeon Link, with all the puzzle fights, hero gatherings and upgrades familiar from RPG world; just the puzzle fashion felt more original in Dungeon Link, and here the graphics style is less cute and more realistic (on level of what could be found on Marvel comics). Stronghold building then is this very typical light real time strategy game stuff, where you need X amount of resources and Y amount of time to build - and the time is usually at least minutes if not hours or even days. Some buildings allow more stuff to be made and some buildings allow more upgrades to the other buildings. Done in quite simple fashion, and it's not quite in the focus of this game unlike in for instance Fallout Shelter, in which the main focus is building and upkeeping the base.
Mentioning Fallout Shelter, a rip off of that, Hustle Castle, has been the last game I've played with some of similar mechanics with fantasy setting as well. Empires & Puzzles manages to evade most of the pitfalls of Hustle Castle. Progress of your stronghold is not forcefully pipelined in the fashion that you'd need to do every stupid upgrade for every building in practice, before can get to the next tier for any structure. Both also have some inevitable PvP, but in Empires & Puzzles it is not frustrating - gains or losses are not insane amounts of resources, but almost more important can be to gain quest kills and rank without it ruining your game.
Whereas in Hustle Castle the production of resources without plundering fellow players would take days for anything (and similarly the resources piled up for days would be robbed in an instance), in Empires & Puzzles PvP has only little effect on resource levels. In Hustle Castle you could pay yourself off with those stupidities or suffer with uncertain and slow growth, but in Empires & Puzzles it's still possible to keep slow but stable growth without paying. As something common in positive sense for both Empires & Puzzles though I find their asynchronous group PvP matches, as they are some of the better sides in both. Established in very different fashion, but both requring certain tactical aspects and bring nice change to ordinary gameplay.
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| Did you really think that the Dark Lords would have anything new to say after all the decades of RPGs? |
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| I guess this is a slight improvement in defence over 1980's in bikini armor style. |
Since I'm not very fashionable person who would renew my Android device once a year, I am glad that Empires & Puzzles application itself is rather light - it doesn't take minutes on my old Samsung Galaxy J5 to load, like so many other "complex" games do. This means that I can play a little bit on short breaks too, which is usually exactly the thing I'm expecting from a mobile game - if I'm stationed at home, I can always play with proper computer. The app does take almost 200 Mb though, which I find a bit much of used space, but I can live with it since I don't have time to play many games at the same time anyway on my mobile device. For most people with more appropriate device storage size this probabaly is no problem.
Overall I've found Empires & Puzzles to be a positive surprise, and I'm not exactly surprised if it has been at least moderately successful. I was expecting it to be a nice little game that could be played for few days every now and then, but I have been playing it a bit more often daily than I was expecting. For many aspects it seems relatively refined and balanced, so that I have been able to enjoy even as a free player for way longer than expected. I also liked how the start was not too easy, but then again the game actually does turn rather fast into grinding for stronger hero components and waiting for possibilities to play for more. In many games those are made much worse of course with Pay to Win features being much more prominant than in this one.
Much of grinding can done by autoplay too - in all irony though. As in this nowadays common feature in games that they will grind for the player without the player actually needing to play the game tend to make me wonder do the game developers really bother to think reasons why such features are desirable in the first place... I mean seriously, if the game needs features to let the game play itself, why to play it in the first place? This topic could have its very own article.
Basically this also means that I do see likely reasons why I'll quit playing Empires & Puzzles: sooner or later I'll get bored on waiting and intentionally slowed up progress as a free player and quit the game because it starts to take too much time from me. I don't see much reason why to play euros in two digits let alone three digit values for a game like this, yet it seems to me that in case not wanting to wait for days for everything that would be the price. Again, it's way better for these aspects though than many other games, or I guess I should say less bad. I was expecting getting fed up with it soon after the first week, and I have not come across it after two weeks of playing. In addition, joining an alliance has made the game more fun to play, which probably is not a surprise.
I also like it that the growth for heroes is not insane - level 10 player might have half the strength of a level 20 player, and that is acceptable, especially as there are games in which that difference would mean ten times the power difference. That just is not fun, especially when there is PvP included. Sure I am an underdog in alliance war at starter level 12, but due puzzle mechanics and non-exponential power growth, I can still be able to at least scratch the more powerful opponents. Same goes for raids - the mechanics give this impression that even the weaker player has some meaning out there, instead of being simply stomped out while bigger ones dance solos. In a way wars even remind me of the days when I played a lot of Fiesta Online and enjoyed the Guild Tournaments there, even while the game mechanics are completely different.
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| I wonder if the pose has a name |
So shortly put, I can recommend Empires & Puzzles with relatively little reservations if you're into moble games at all. I find it as an acceptable light replacement for MMORPGs, as those in traditional sense wouldn't really work with mobile device interface and environment in my opinion. The game is has no remarkably original or particularly imagination rousing content, but it seems made with a fair deal of care and it's something easy to play.
The Good:
+ Light app starts fast
+ Relatively balanced with freemium setup
+ Not too easy for too long time
+ Power growth is not exponential
+ Alliance raids and wars
+ Relative freedom of choice with buiding stronghold
+ Smooth gameplay and various nice features combined
The Bad:
- P2W mechanics
- Quite grindy
- Storytelling is not a strong side here
- Not so much interesting content to play after a while
- Nothing genuinely original to see
P. S. I got the text above finished yesterday, and then when I went to work this morning, it looked a bit different than expected from the words in the first chapter. Found out that I had been like a regular trooper at late Autumn in the western front of 1944 with futile dreams of getting back home for Christmas after months of fighting since the D-Day, as the opponent was already beaten. No, the Spring would not come here yet, because general Winter had decided to launch its last desperate Amuri Offensive: Wacht am Tammerkoski.
So in the morning it was cold enough for the city halving stream Tammerkoski to be frozen (it usually stays flowing even at -20 C) and when I returned from work, the streets looked like this:
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