Empires and Dungeons

I tried this one thinking it was a TBS along the lines of the Heroes of Might and Magic series. It certainly looks nice, but there is no real strategy involved. It all boils down to moving your character around and collecting resources. The options for building and buying units are very limited, and the actual combat consists of merely clicking buttons repeatedly until you've either won or lost.

I played the demo a couple of times.

The edges of the game are designed nicely: the art, the flavor and I haven't seen any bugs or spelling errors.
But the core of the game is lacking. Dungeons are long and tiresome. I found myself avoiding dungeons even though they were the most lucrative way of making money.
The non-dungeon combat was also disappointing. Either the game is not so good or the demo map was poorly chosen, because by the time you arrived at your opponent, you could always easily defeat it in combat.

This game is smooth, slick and almost perfectly executed. The gameplay, graphics, music and interface are all fairly basic, but in a good way. The game is easy to pick up and learn and the flexible save feature makes short sessions as feasible as whole-evening marathons.

I was initially concerned that the game seemed to lack strategy, but this is not actually the case. The easier levels allow you to get away with being slack. The harder levels, by contrast, punish you harshly for not squeezing out every possible advantage from your position.

The concept - a wargame in which the leader of your forces explores dungeons to gain wealth and power - works well. It doesn't lend itself to being taken too seriously, which makes the game quite relaxing.

The game has a couple of weaknesses worth mentioning since they may be offputting for some players. First, there's quite a bit of randomness to it. This is particularly annoying on the hardest levels where you may find yourself using Save and Load more like game mechanics than tools of convenience. Second, the computer players don't play by the same rules as you at all. This is understandable given the nature of the game, but occasionally irritating.

There are also a few design decisions which seem questionable. The way that a city you only just fail to conquer regenerates all of its defenders instantly whilst you have to pay for a new army means that you might as well reload after most failed conquests. The fact that battlefield strategy requires multiple unit types to be interesting which you cannot build until some way into each scenario. The fact that there is very little interaction between the in-dungeon and empire aspects of the game.

Overall, though, this game is good stuff. It isn't boldly innovative or technically outstanding, but if you like this sort of game then what you get is around 100 hours of solid, challenging play for a decently low price.