The problem with Castaways is probably also its strength. Long stretches go by where you merely wait, your progress stymied by your stamina bar as the minutes inch pass like ants across the sand. The scenery rarely changes, and when it does it bears a strong similarly to what you've already seen. You hunt, you scavenge for food, you look for scraps for shelter, and then you get back up in the morning and do it all again. In short, it's probably quite similar to the life of a real castaway.
The turn based strategy game has been a mainstay on videogame consoles for many years. Over that time they've gotten significantly more complex, but the vibe has largely stayed the same. Sid Meier's Civilization series is probably the most popular, and it's certainly the best when it comes to showing what the genre is capable of. Medieval Battlefields, on the other hand, finds itself on the opposite end of that spectrum.
The Oregon Trail is brutal. When it's not subjecting you to the ills of dysentery and incurable snake bites, it's plaguing you with bugs and forcing you to spend lots of virtual currency. It's very much the same game that swallowed many hours of free time back in the 1980s, but it loses some of its addictiveness in the transition to Facebook. There's more than enough cholera to go around, but a host of bugs and an over reliance on cash items leave this new incarnation broke down by the trail.
Social Empires looks to take elements found in real-time strategy games and simplify them for Facebook. While the concept is sound, everything else falls apart rather quickly.
Knight's Quest isn't the kind of game you usually see on Facebook. It's a dungeon crawling RPG, though it's not as brutally difficult as most games in the genre. It's a more casual take, but it's also woefully repetitive and severely lacking social features.
A girl finds a book which opens a portal to another world... What sounds like the usual premise of a hidden object game is actually the foundation for the new building simulation Abigail and the Kingdom of Fairs. While the game is slightly reminiscent of Wonderburg or Carnival Mania, it is unfortunately a case of "Would have been awesome two years ago." That said, it's still worth a look for fans of the genre.
Fans of defense games, rejoice. In the midst of an over-crowded field, we have a new game to celebrate. It's called Legendary Wars, and it's a delightful, goofy little game that successfully incorporates a slew of different genres.
If the television series The Office has taught us nothing else, it's that the drudgery of cubicle life can actually be funny. Office Daze attempts to capitalize on this idea by having you boss around an office full of bored co-workers, forcing them to do tedious tasks for very little money. It looks and plays adequately, but sadly the game is missing the sense of humor and charm that made its inspiration so popular.