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Empire Craft

Empire Craft is a newly released game that has generated a HUGE notoriety among the internet community for it's very unethical advertising - breasts. That's right, most of the ads around the internet including facebook have scantily clad women laying around in lingerie. Does this have anything to do with the game and is the game adult oriented? Nope. It's just a sleezy gimmick. If that doesn't prepare you for my review then nothing will.

The game came out of beta and is *free* in the fact that you can play in a limited amount without the purchase of the in game currency called Diamonds. In fact, numerous quests require diamonds. Even though it says you can actually earn them by doing various quests and events, you can't. It's a lie. In fact, the prices for these diamonds in US currency are so outrageous that noone even considers buying them unless they earn over $3000 a month. They did recently lower the price for Diamonds due to many many complaints, but it is still outrageous. $1 for 10 diamonds. Some of the quests require purchase of items which are 70 or 80 diamonds a piece. You are constantly encouraged to "spend diamonds" in order to accomplish simple tasks faster.

Now that you've read the important stuff, I'll delve into the game basics.
You get to choose between dwarf, orc or human for your alliance against the forces of the Devils. You start with a city with a level 0 city hall, a lumberyard, quarry, iron mine and farm (food).

Upgrading is basically a matter of having the correct amount of wood, stone, iron and food in order to build the structure to the next level. In many respects, the game mimics the game Travian. But what really drives this game is Heroes which are hired at a Tavern for about 50-70 gold. Heroes are important because you can't control your troops or attack or do quests without them. But getting the gold is another matter entirely. You can't sell everything, you are limited to what your hero has on or very rarely some of the items you get from a rare chest (typically wooden). Quests you complete with your hero on a daily basis will earn you a leather key which are almost never used.

There are quests for your union (in game alliance of players), military status (your efforts in attacking the devils), hero status, or for developing your character (beginner line of quests for learning the ropes.) By the way the final quest in the beginner line encourages you to "Charge" your account by purchasing diamonds. Sleazebags.

Upon reaching a certain population size (or more specifically commerce points) you can build a "sub city". A sub city can be occupied but you cannot lose your capitol city. For your cities besides the mines and lumberyards and farms, etc inside the city you can also occupy ones outside your city, up to 5. A lot of times these will be occupied by other players and you will have to send your heroes to claim the resources and defend them as necessary.

For some of the more advanced parts of the game, crystal mines are required and allow upgrading the Union shops as well as other things in the game allowing you to acquire better items. No, these do not give you Diamonds. They are protected by huge numbers of Devil troops and require join effort of Union players or a player with an enormous....army and huge...cities and well trained in the arts of....heroism.

Besides that, the ultimate goal is to be the biggest jerk with the largest set of balls in the game so no one will mess with you. I'm not sure the game ever ends. At least with Travian, there is a end of game sequence with the Natars where you have to complete a World Wonder. Then it restarts.

In summary, I give my this game two fingers up. Or rather the game creator does. Yes, that was fingers not thumbs. They are not here to entertain you. They are here only to make money off of you. Did I mention that he was sued by Microsoft for click fraud? Yeah, that's the kind of person you're dealing with. I hope you don't supply him with your paypal information. He is Chinese businessman Eric Lam who is also the person behind Evony. And now you know the rest of the story.

Eternal Lands Beta

Eternal Lands is a free MMORPG that is now in Beta based in what seems to be the middle ages with magic and fighting. The graphics, while not premium content, will apparently not run well on computers over 5 years old, which is a shame due to the small footprint the game takes up on the harddrive. My computer constantly registered 59/60 FPS during my trial.

The character creation process is still a bit clunky. At the sign-in screen you have a button to create a new character, but it doesn't automatically pop up the character generation screen. You have to click the button on the bar at the bottom to rename and set up your character.

After creating my guy, I proceeded to follow the tutorial. It's a pretty decent tutorial and if you need any help along the way there are plenty of people to talk you through it. Just join the newbie channel in the upper left corner and type "@" and your question.

Along your travels you can harvest vegetables, sticks, and eventually ore and other items. The graphics are about the quality you can expect from Runescape but that's an acceptable sacrifice for the payoff in game size. While World of Warcraft folders can take up to 10-12Gb of space for the high quality graphics, the download for this game is about 20Mb, plus the separate download for sound.

Movement in the game is a bit tedious. I couldn't find a run option and targeting the rabbits and beavers is laborious in the extreme. Not only do they move as fast as you do but they move almost constantly and unless you are with in range to attack it, you still have to worry about terrain obstructing your view (and thus your attack).

Healing can take a while as well unless you can afford a good healing potion, but for the first 15 attack levels (while you are learning to fight) you can use the tutorial dude to heal your character instead of eating to increase your regen and sitting down and waiting for 10 minutes.

Items while easy to obtain are nearly impossible to sell at the early areas unless you happen to have rabbit furs which you need for the fighting quest, or vegetables from the garden.

All-in-all, I found it a generally fun free game to start playing and would recommend giving it a try if you're looking for a free alternative to World of Warcraft.