iPad: Castlecraft reviewed

Also from the Freeverse family Castlecraft follows in the footsteps of Age of Empire, only you don't get to choose where you want to start. You are a medieval prince/ess and are tasked with rebuilding your empire after a devastating attack.



The interface well thought out. Commanding your army is pain staking, and a little strange in that you can only send out one army at a time. That army can be 10 people or 1, and once they capture whatever they were sent for, you cannot use that army to capture something else. You have to recall them back home, and then send them out again.

The hardest part of the game is managing your resources. I found that two lumbermills and three gold mines allowed me to keep up with everything. If you complete the quests in a logical manner, and check what they yield as rewards, you can progress very quickly to the point where you have to subscribe or quit. The game starts out free, but for 4.99 a month (5.99 for 3 months, there is a 12 month plan but the cost eludes me) you can take advantage of all of the benefits of the game.

The Good:

- The graphics are interesting.
- Resource management is always a fun challenge, but if you blow it you are going to wait a long time to get it back.
- You can sell something for exactly what you paid for it, a level of recycling that far exceeds the time frame... This does however come in handy as you can build farms as a bank of sorts to store money and avoid the cap.
- Its an MMO! The first (as far as I know) MMO for a mobile device, so its bound to have its wrinkles, but this brings a level of complexity and diversity to the game that no developer can ever match.

The Bad:

- Expanding your empire is almost impossible, one of the larger quests is to take over a neighboring city! However, you can't attack another player and win. While this is a positive, since you can go away from the game for a week and come back and your city will still be there, it makes some of the game a little pointless. There are NPC cities, but you can't tell them apart from the players.
- Dragon crystals are a blatant money grab, while they do form naturally, and are used to excelerate building/research, they are hard to come by. Naturally you can buy them for additional funds, but since you can't lose your city you could just wait it out.
- Being able to attack only one thing at a time limits game play and makes it more of a turn based, attack and come back later game, than a real time strategy.
NPC activity should exist, presently there isn't any. You never get attacked by a dragon, or wandering evagilist...Add a traveling merchant with strange wares for large sums of gold to add some spice.
- Its an MMO! I know I said this was a positive, and it is, but since we are all stuck with Wifi only iPads right now, you can only play it in hot spots.

I liked this game at the start, but it started to wear on me. I have reached the point where I have to subscribe or quit and I haven't decided if I will take it further. Timo, one of the developers of the game, was online taking comments from us all so they are definately working hard to develop it and expand it, and it is a relatively cheap game, but...