Armageddon Empires Review

It's difficult to have a truly original idea in anything these days (if it ever was easy, I can't say), and Vic Davis, the creator, programmer, tester, maintainer, and distributor of Armageddon Empires, seems to have realized this. So he's thrown out the idea entirely. Armageddon Empires is a game cobbled together, much like a patchwork rifle built from spare parts scrounged from ransacked hardware stores, from the best parts of a wide variety of genres. And the wonderful thing about it is, Armageddon Empires is unique. It's a totally new creation unlike almost anything else I've ever played despite being made from some of the most recognizable (even tired) tropes of strategy gaming. 

 

"This is like Strategy Gaming's greatest hits album..."

AE is set in a nondescript post-apocalyptic wasteland. It's a war game, so it has a hex grid and rules to govern supply and movement. It's a card game, so each player has a deck of cards from which they can draw into their “hand” and from there insert into the game. It's a 4x game too, so it has resources, and the player must constantly expand and conquer new areas of the map to secure resources for himself and prevent his enemy from gathering them. There's also a bit of classic turn-based stack maneuvering involved. The way in which players have to group regular and hero units together and move them around the map reminds me of Age of Wonders or Heroes of Might and Magic. This is like Strategy Gaming's greatest hits album, and it's way better than most of their other stuff. 

The sense of scarcity that this game invokes is truly amazing. Every single card, no matter how insignificant, must be jealously hoarded and used only at the most effective possible time. A single weapon card attached to a mediocre infantry unit could conceivably turn the tide of a battle in your favor. An artillery piece could be the difference between slaughtering the enemy and losing all of your troops. Finally, losing a structure – a barracks or a fort or a refinery – is a crushing blow from which it is almost impossible to recover. This isn't just a strategy game with some post-apocalyptic art; the entire gameplay system creates a desperate struggle for extremely scarce resources in a vast desert of death and danger. It's also really fun. 

 

There's a ton of moving parts of which to keep track. Not only does the player have to explore the map to locate other players and new resources, he has to manage his intelligence services and try to keep out enemy infiltrators while simultaneously attempting to assassinate and sabotage his enemies. He also has to balance his resource intake with his hand of cards. Each card has a deploy cost, which for some units is tiny but for other, more powerful units is immense. The benefits of having a giant robotic missile-slinging killing machine have to be matched against the opportunity cost, which could be deploying an entire army of less powerful units. 

 

The makeup of armies is also important. Some armies can be made up of fast-moving recon units and commanded by a hero specializing in stealth and subterfuge. Other armies are made up of heavy bruisers with giant guns and artillery pieces and tanks. Those armies can be commanded by heroes who give bonuses to luck and firepower. Other heroes can stay back at base with the garrison army and research new weapons and technologies, or fend off enemy spies by doing counter-intel. 

 

 

 

The choice of faction is also important in this game, and some factions play so differently that you have to almost learn to play the game again from scratch. The primary sides in the game include the Empire of Man, the Machine Empire, the mutants, and the Xenopods. The Empire of Man is the closest thing to a conventional faction. The Xenopods are aliens, the mutants are a hybrid of humanoids and lizard people, and the Machine Empire is all robots. All of them have totally different card decks and play styles. I played the Empire of Man almost exclusively because I would get clobbered most of the time playing anything else. 

 

Another great aspect of the game is the creator, Vic Davis, who has demonstrated a rare and admirable quality among game developers: the willingness to improve his game for free. He's already released one mini-expansion pack called Cults of the Wastelands, which adds a bunch of non-player cults already established on the map.  These are hell-bent on conquering the wasteland and have unique ways of doing it. One of the cults spreads a disease that can cripple a player's armies in a matter of turns.  Another one captures units from all sides and enslaves them. Yet another one has a nuke they can threaten to drop on your base if you don't comply with their demands. I would say that cults are a wrench thrown into the gears of this game, but the gears were already buried under a huge pile of wrenches way before this expansion was released. Yet, Mr. Davis is readying another wrench which he'll toss later this month. It's called Tip of the Spear, and it's supposed to make infantry units more useful. 

 

"Armageddon Empires is a wonderful game..."

Armageddon Empires is a wonderful game in equal parts because of the tough choices it forces the player to make and the wide variety of things the player has to keep track of in order to win. I've read about (but never played) war games that required an hour's worth of planning before moving on to the next turn. Armageddon Empires isn't quite like that, but there are going to be lots of head-scratching brow-furrowing moments in between clicks on the End Turn button. 

 

There are a couple of issues that have to be discussed. The interface is not perfect. Your current hand of cards can't be displayed all at once along the bottom of the game's window, so in order to see everything you have to scroll a couple times to the left or the right. It's a bit annoying because the scroll buttons are so small, and the ability to see your entire hand would be very useful. 

 

Everything involving randomness is calculated using on-screen dice rolls. While this may be a way to channel the old spirit of board war-gaming, it gets pretty tedious to watch dice spin every single time you have to resolve a combat or figure out who takes their turn first. A much nicer approach would be to have a single “Go” button that figures out the results of a combat in an instant without all of the spinning dice. 

 

Also, this game is built with some sort of strange middleware that doesn't allow multiplayer. Armageddon Empires offline stole away my time like a bandit, but the opportunity to play multiplayer over the internet or even by e-mail would be the heist of the century. I literally wouldn't do anything else. 

 

Armageddon Empires is an expertly crafted nail-biter of a strategy game that defies easy description and drags you relentlessly down into an endless spiral of late nights, skipped meals and abandoned friends. It's worth every penny and every hour of your free time.