War for the Overworld
This is my first Steam review, so i’ll try to make it a good one; it might be a bit longwinded (TL;DR is at the bottom), but i’d like to make it as thorough as possible becouse the game and it’s devs deserve as much.
First off, my PC specs so you’ll know what i play it on:
• Windows 7 64 bit
• Intel Core i5 4570 @3.20 GHz
• AMD Radeon R7 200 Series, 2GB RAM
• 8GB RAM
My history with the genre
I’ve played Dungeon Keeper 1 + The deeper dungeons & Dungeon Keeper 2 on multiple occasions & systems over the years.
– Real player with 221.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best RTS Fantasy Games.
Update April 11, 2015:
THE memory leak has been fixed, but the game has such poor performance across the board that the game is unplayable. Still crashes. Still many many bugs and unfinished things. I am way too frustrated trying to play through the broken, unfinished stuff with awful performance.
Beating the final “boss” doesn’t even make sense in the campaign. Maybe there’s supposed to be some more cutscenes that explain it that aren’t finished/added yet? The overall story is very poorly written.
– Real player with 112.3 hrs in game
Grand Attrition
Okay, I’m not a big review writer but I found this game and thought I’d give it a go.
Things I liked:
Over all this isn’t too bad for a cheap indie game. All of the units (Normal, special, or otherwise) are actually unique with their own functions and purposes, which was rather nice. Map size goes from small to rather absurdly large. Honestly most of the standard stuff is par for the course but the things I really enjoyed are the Side-grades, the forts, the special units, and most importantly, the Talents. The side grades are all just that, sidegrades, they really change up how you can tackle a game and once I figured out that I could do that to the unit spawning buildings it really helped. The forts are these “Structures that contain “loot” that can be very beneficial for the rest of your current run. Then the special units, Some of them are spawnable units that cost a lot of resources but they all do different things aside from just attacking whats ever in front of them. Then you have the non-spawnable units which are also strange and fun to use. Finally the talents, I really love the talents in this game and it’s one of the main reasons I keep playing. They are a ton of fun to use and can really change up how you play a game. Furthermore, none of them feel particularly jarring or like you are supposed to have them. My favorite two are Explosive when touched and conversion blossom. My computer hates it but its great to watch unfold at higher difficulties.
– Real player with 10.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best RTS RPG Games.
Fun free-form strategy game that doesn’t lock you into one form of playing the game. A good way to pass the time with plenty of features to experiment with. The game has great potential and plenty of room for improvisation and improvement.
– Real player with 5.6 hrs in game
Monolithic
So I really do like the idea of this game, and I did have a lot of fun playing it!
However I think the tutorial should be a little expanded? I still don’t quite understand how capturing the cities work and I played a few rounds with a friend.
I wish the sandbox had monoliths to fight so I could practice there, and I think it would be helpful if we could pick the Monoliths we’re using in the sandbox mode so that we could practice them against others.
Sometimes when you play the tutorial it freezes up and doesn’t actually play, but that can be remedied by closing the game and opening it again.
– Real player with 1.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best RTS Mythology Games.
I recommend this game only because it is free. it seems like the game needs a little bug squashing and there is no single player. HOWEVER, I like the idea of it, the UI works, the art looks good, and the music is great! Here are some videos of gameplay and a broken tutorial:
Without multiplayer, there is not much to sink your teeth into, especially considering that the tutorial broke on the second “playthrough”. I would not suggest getting your hopes up for this until the player base expands or you have friends who are interested in playing.
– Real player with 0.4 hrs in game
TRIBAL
TRIBAL is a Persistent Online Multiplayer Real Time 2D Strategy game where you take the role of Tribe Chieftain and lead your medieval tribe to global domination… or not. Chieftains are very busy, but the fight for survival and conquest go on with or without you. Prepare your Tribe for greatness even when you must be away on important business. With 8 different player avatars, 100 unique NPC units, 60 spells, 75 different structures, 12 boss encounters, and various inventions and upgrades you are sure to find a retreat whether playing alone, with friends, or against the global community of tribes on public and semi-public servers. Build your Tribe. Conquer, be conquered. Repeat.
What do you mean persistent?
TRIBAL never sleeps, even when you do. Your tribe will continue to work around the clock until you return. It is up to you to ensure they have marching orders while you are away. But peace and happiness are fleeting. There are Dark Lords and other players that might have their own motivations to achieve greatness.
Do you have to play online?
TRIBAL is an online game. It requires an instance of the TRIBAL server and the TRIBAL client. You are free to run your own local network server or a private server to play alone or with family and friends. Setup is easy and there are no additional costs or requirements for standing up your own server to play. Optionally, you can log into one of the community servers and play with other tribes all over the world.
Isn’t it boring to play alone?
TRIBAL is more fun with other people, but even if you decide to journey alone on a private server the Dark Lords will always be working together to overthrow your tribe. The Dark Lords are always waiting. They will continue building, spawning, and progressing as long as you keep a server running. Of course, you can always shut down the server – even Dark Lords sleep when the universe shuts down.
Is it an RPG or an RTS?
TRIBAL is an RTS, but also has various elements from the role-playing genre. TRIBAL is a real-time strategy game where you and your tribe earn experience and resources by developing land, creating new tribe members, and fighting off the Dark Lords and other tribes. Tribe members can teach each other new things or earn them by defeating the bosses at the 12 Gates or conquering other tribes. The higher the level of each tribe member – the more powerful they become.
If TRIBAL never sleeps, how do new players on public servers stand a chance?
Every player has a home base… although space is limited new players can build up a tribe without the threat of attack. If you or your tribe is at their home base you are safe. Once you are ready – you can venture out into the global village. Once you are away from home, you are vulnerable to attack. If you are defeated, you will be returned to your home base and retain your experience, spells, blueprints, and inventions… but all of your tribe members and improvements will parish. Time to rebuild your tribe!
Is it Micro or Macro?
TRIBAL offers a variety of ways to manage your empire including Micromanagement, Macromanagement, and Hands-free. You can micromanage every tribe member if you chose giving each one specific orders and duties. As you spawn new minions, they will also perform some duties by default according to their role allowing you to focus on more immediate objectives. Finally, each unit can also be set for automation. When automated, units will be controlled by the AI system and carry out their duties according to a set of priorities to ensure their development and growth.
So what’s the goal?
Build your tribe. Conquer new lands. Enlighten your people. Get rich. Rejoice. Rule the world with an iron fist or gentle hand. Rush, turtle, explore, idle… the choice is yours. Defeat the bosses at the 12 Gates to gain access to new maps and higher levels. Help other tribes or crush them. Play alone or with the masses. But ultimately the goal is simple, survive and prosper.
Lords of Nether
NOTE: Lords of Nether is in an early state of development and will be undergoing many exciting changes and additions in the coming times! The contents presented in this page are not final and serve to show the baseline of where the game is headed! Expect far more to come in every way!
A dark power returns to the ancient and blood-soaked world of Antioch, to claim what rightfully belongs to it and bring the world of Man to ruin! That power is you, my Netherlord!
Discover a New Era of Dungeon Management
Lords of Nether is a Dungeon Management Game that blends Real-Time Strategy and God Game elements to create a new and more involved take on the genre. You may control your creatures directly in typical RTS fashion, allowing for complex combat strategy and management. You can manage space efficiently and creatively, through the use furnishings and other building tools. Taking control of the villain, one of four powerful, dark demigods known as Netherlords, you return to the world after centuries of banishment with the singular purpose of bringing it to heel under your control. Immerse yourself in a deep, storied world of Dark Fantasy and bring it all to ruin!
Build Your Dungeon
You will carve out and build vast, intricate and deadly underground dungeons, where you will gather minions to your cause, research new magics and knowledge and build devious trap gauntlets to protect yourself from invading heroes.
Amass a Dark Army
You will grow and be able to directly control an army of fiendish, living, thinking creatures, a vast menagerie ranging from cowardly goblins to terrifying, blood-thirsty demons. You will need to provide them with necessities and comforts and make sure they grow strong, so that they may turn your enemies into gory heaps.
Vanquish Mighty Foes
As any self respecting Dark Lord, you will find wretched heroes at your doorstep, seeking to undo your sinister plans and put an end to your evil. Show them just how misguided they really are, Lord.
Conquer Different Game Modes
Explore a multitude of different planned game-modes:
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Sandbox - Free building mode that allows you to express your wicked creativity!
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Skirmish - Play against AI Netherlords to test your skills!
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Multiplayer Deathmatch - Pit yourself against other Players and determine who is the Greatest Evil!
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Survival - See how long your designs and tactics can help you last being assailed by wave after wave of never-ending heroic scum!
…And Take Over the World
Embark on an epic Single-player campaign to conquer the ancient world of Antioch! The mighty Empire of Ostoria stands in your way to world domination and it’s monarch, the great King Albrecht will do anything to stop you! Travel distant lands, from great rural plains, through scorching deserts and frigid mountain slopes, to the very heartland of the Empire and crush all that stands in your way! Take your armies from the underground to the very world above and reduce it to a burning ruin! This world belongs to you, Netherlord!
4 Civilizations
It’s a funny game, easy to master.
There is no tutorial, but you’ll learn to play it quite easily.
– Real player with 5.4 hrs in game
The lack of tutorial and community guides can throw new players off. However, once you got the hang of how to get around the game and the UI, it gets going. It’s nice and all but the game can use plenty improvements like multiple save points, pausing the game to plan with menu blocking, and faster screen scroll. But considering how short the game can be, perhaps you just want to quickly unlock everything and speed-click through the game. There’s potential to this game if the dev wills it so. The rest of you contemplating to buy or not; get when it’s on sales (at least more than 75% off). Unlock all achievements and not look back. You’re not playing “Banished” here…
– Real player with 4.7 hrs in game
Beneath the Mountain
Beneath the Mountain is a dwarven city-builder and real-time-strategy game. Mine your way into the mountain, discover gold and silver, construct buildings, recruit an army, build traps, and defeat the vile creatures that lurk in the dark caves of the mountain. Most importantly, find the heart of the mountain before the orcs destroy your kingdom.
Beneath the Mountain is a top-down, isometric, 3D game that is meant to be played casually and can be put down and resumed at any time. The focus of the game is on expanding your kingdom (mining), constructing buildings, training and army, and setting traps. All of this plays out in a dark settings over multiple underground floors. Games are meant to be lengthy and challenging as you try to expand your kingdom while defending it from constant threat.
You can play the game now for free on Itch.IO up until the release of the game here on Steam!
Also, make sure you check out our growing Discord community. We post all of our changes and development updates there, and its a great place to discuss strategies. We hope to see you there!
Driftland: The Magic Revival
Yet another ‘neutral’ rating. I’ve leaned on the positive side as a heads up for the developer, but see below.
Driftland is a nice original RTS with quite novel mechanics. It shows a lot of promise, yet often fails to deliver.
Let’s start with the good sides.
First, the active pause system works like charm. Basically, you can start any action while on pause, it drastically decreases the usual for RTSes time pressure.
The island positioning subsystem is probably the most important feature in the game, and it works, too. Forging an empire from fragments is fun, requires planning, and so on. There is a room for improvement (no flexible joints, no island rotating, no group movement…), but it is already good, and you might want to play the game for it alone.
– Real player with 131.1 hrs in game
An interesting adaptation of Majesty but lackluster campaign
If you’ve played Majesty, this is basically that except:
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The game world is made up of islands that you can move around and build bridges between.
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There are flying mounts that your units can combine with to make them stronger and let them traverse freely.
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There are more resources and most are all can be gathered through mines that you build after discovering the resources with a unit from your castle.
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There is a skill tree that unlocks a goodly array of economic, magic, military, and utility perks.
– Real player with 51.9 hrs in game
Empires of the Undergrowth
One of my favorite indie games. While only in early access, it easily has several hours worth of content already.
Four colony types are available as of posting, with more to be released in the future, each with its own unique features. The ereptor, gene thief ants, a fictional species that allows the player to mix in other ant species and their abilities; the fusca, black ants, which act as an introductory species with basic worker and soldier roles; the rufa, wood ants, which split their soldiers between defensive and offensive roles; the atta, leaf cutter ants, which have a unique resource system involving gathering, food production, and waste disposal, as well as four castes to make resources and combat more dynamic.
– Real player with 683.7 hrs in game
This game is great and is most likely to be enjoyed by fans of the real time strategy genre. Currently there are 4 levels each with a challenge mode and many difficulty settings which you will tackle as you control two different species of ant colony. The ants must collect food to grow their colony which can in itself have various different methods applied such as the strategic placement of tiles for upgrading purposes to the ratio of worker ants to warrior ants so that they can defeat the many hungry predators around them which seek to devour their queen! For those who like a challenge you will get quite a bit of enjoyment and playtime from tackling the hardest versions of these levels as for others this will be a shorter 2-3 hour experience which will be enjoyable nonetheless. inbetween these levels you will visit your formicariam (ANT TANK) where your success in these levels provides resources for your main colony which is a species of ant that can take the genes from other ant species and have their queen produce them within the colony. This formicarium colony itself has two challenges to face which are kind of like a hoard mode. If you finish all of this content and are still eager for more there are a handfull of other modes which may entertain for awhile such as the demo levels (earlier levels with a more basic concept), arena mode (a mode where you can pit various creatures found in the game against each other) and Freeplay mode (where you start a colony on one of two maps with many options for you to tweak for a customised experience which is scored upon the defeat of your colony) and finally the hungry spider level which sees you take control of the one of the ants most deadly predators THE WOLF SPIDER! (This is a slight genre flip as you control the one spider which grows and levels as you defeat enemies working your way up to bringing down other huge predators.) I very highly reccomend this game and support the development team who are constantly keeping the community around the game informed on what they are working on next.
– Real player with 281.9 hrs in game
Gênese
Welcome to your Universe!
Gênese allows you to enter a meditative and relaxing experience of sculpting your own Universe, exploring physics in space and your creativity. Here you can create star systems and fully detailed planets, from a tiny molecule to an huge orb floating in the great void. You will be the powerful entity ruling this Universe, bending and manipulating the forces of nature and creating life. Rising from cosmic dust, this very life will go forward on its own crusade, evolving into intelligent life and conquering the arena you built, as you watch and care (or destroy) its progress, in a high detailed environment.
BE THE COSMIC STORY WRITER
Gênese is also a story generator where every action, every event, every birth and death is recorded in the fabric of space and time. Planets formed from asteroids and cosmic dust, stars dying in colossal supernovae - or becoming black holes, the rise of galactic civilizations from its rudimentary ancestors and, fatefully, to their extermination caused by themselves, by others or… by you.
WITNESS THE POWER OF GRAVITY
Every object wandering in the system will obey the laws of gravitation, effectively being attracted to one another at some point where they collide, merge, become satellites, explode, desintegrate: Watch powerful planetary collisions and the chaotic environment of the early stages of a stellar system that will create unique celestial bodies orbiting that system. Bring order and stabilize it to allow the appearing of life or consume every planet and molecule.
CHEMISTRY IS IMPERATIVE
Every particle can be combined, to form new molecules with new properties - adding unique features to its host planet. Elements and molecules will melt, solidify or evaporate given the right temperature and circunstances. You can engineer a lush paradisiac world or a toxic burning-hot planet. Creating the perfect environment for life to thrive or the most inhospitable place depends on that right combination.
FOLLOW YOUR CO-CREATORS
Once you create life and it becomes intelligent, a new level of complexity and fun is added to the game: they will evolve, create, explore, colonize and get to know those places you already know - and created. These beings you raised will become “co-creators” of some level, changing the landscape for good or evil purposes, advancing independently through the Eons, bringing on their own culture and technology. Watch over them or destroy them - if you decide there’s a reason for that.