Avalon Wars Review

If you’ve ever played a game like Haypi Kingdom or Island Empire and wished there were just a few more spaceships and high-tech soldiers, Avalon Wars is for you. It offers up a similar, menu-driven style simulation that lets you build up a planetary settlement and engage in intergalactic combat with other players. This means that the gameplay straddles the line between being both deep and boring, at times giving you plenty of control over what you want to do, while bombarding you with repetitive actions and difficult to parse menus. But for those who are into that sort of thing, there’s a good amount on offer here.

By
Share this
  • Share this on Facebook
  • Share this on Twitter

Take Haypi Kingdom, throw in some spaceships, and you have Avalon Wars

If you’ve ever played a game like Haypi Kingdom or Island Empire and wished there were just a few more spaceships and high-tech soldiers, Avalon Wars is for you. It offers up a similar, menu-driven style simulation that lets you build up a planetary settlement and engage in intergalactic combat with other players. This means that the gameplay straddles the line between being both deep and boring, at times giving you plenty of control over what you want to do, while bombarding you with repetitive actions and difficult to parse menus. But for those who are into that sort of thing, there’s a good amount on offer here.

In an ill-defined future, several decades from now, humans are waging war over rare elements on the titular planet of Avalon. Like in many sci-fi games, there are three different factions, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. You play as a newly recruited commander whose given the difficult task of not only building a successful settlement, but creating an army and expanding your domain across the planet. It’s all pretty hokey and light on details, and to make matters worse the in-game text is plagued with an overabundance of spelling and grammatical errors. The game reads like a poor translation.

Avalon Wars Avalon Wars

Most of your time in Avalon Wars will be spent building up your base. But you don’t really get to customize it like you would in a true city-builder like CityVille or Trade Nations. You can’t place buildings wherever you wish or lay down decorations to spruce things up. Instead, the base is fixed and new buildings pop up automatically when you complete the requisite task or upgrade. All buildings are upgradable and, in a unique twist, they can also be degraded, knocking them down a level so that you can focus your resources and money elsewhere. It’s a great feature that basically serves as an undo button.

You can collect rent from certain buildings while others produce resources, all of which can be used to further upgrade and grow your base. You can also train troops and hire heroes to lead you into battle, which amounts to a simple, automated sequence in which you choose your troops and then watch how things play out. You can compete against both computer and player-controlled armies as you attempt to expand your reach.

It’s all rather complex, and the game does a decent job of teaching you the ropes with a rather lengthy tutorial. Even still, plenty elements in the game remain a mystery and will force you to experiment a bit to figure things out. The problem isn’t so much that there isn’t a lot to do in the game, it’s that it can get mighty repetitive. The combat isn’t all that fun and the constant need to upgrade, upgrade, upgrade soon becomes tiresome. You’ll need a lot of patience to fully enjoy Avalon Wars.

The game also, of course, features the requisite mobile MMO features like a real-time chat room and the ability to form guilds with other players, called legions in the game. These online features work virtually exactly as they do in other, similar games.

How much fun you’ll have with Avalon Wars really depends on what type of player you are. If a game like Haypi Kingdom makes you doze off, there’s nothing all that different on offer here, aside from the theme. But that doesn’t mean that the experience isn’t deep, and if you’re willing to delve into the game’s world of menus and statistics it can prove quite addictive.

The good

    The bad

      70 out of 100