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Historical strategy showdown | Full Review - Epic Age

2K View2023-02-28

Hero collecting, empire management, politics, tactical warfare, and role playing, Epic Age is all of these things combined, and it's playable on Mobile devices!

🟩Pros

+Addicting civilization building gameplay

+Fun hero collecting mechanic

+Amazingly detailed graphics

🟥Cons

-Requires a lot of real-world waiting

-Heavy pay to win mechanics

The basic gist of the game is that it plays similarly to strategy games like Civilization and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, infused with mobile game elements taken from Clash of Clans and Lords Mobile.

Gameplay Analysis

Epic Age is played on a hexagonal grid, with the player's civilization starting with a single city and one battle group called “squads”. From there, the player must build up their kingdom’s infrastructure, expand their territory, and advance their technologies and culture to become a dominant power. The various structures and buildings take different amounts of real-world time to construct and upgrade.

Players start-off with a group of people who just escaped their land destroyed by a volcanic eruption. Players choose their starting location throughout the expansive online world map and build a settlement from there.

Players can slowly expand their territory by conquering neighboring hex tiles, one by one. Some tiles will be more powerful than your current soldiers can handle, so you have to carefully pick which tiles to conquer first, while upgrading your troops, city, and technology.

Troops can be in either of the five available types: Infantry, Archer, Cavalry, Spearman and Artillery. Providing a five-way rock-paper-scissors dynamic of strengths and weaknesses to battles. Players can use this to their advantage when battling other armies.

Each tile will have different resources and benefits it can bring to your civilization, and requires clicking on each in order to farm these resources. Certain resources required for building and upgrading structures take real-world time to produce, further adding to the waiting element. This also entices players to check in once in a while or even play everyday. Even going as far as giving daily login bonuses to players.

This game takes a lot of real-world time

Players typically perform a set of actions or tasks like upgrades, that require a certain amount of time to complete. Once completed, the player must wait a certain amount of real-life time before being able to perform an action again. This wait time can range from a few seconds to several minutes or even hours, depending on the stage of your progression.

There are too many things going on

It’s a highly micromanagement based game, one that entices players to try and click every nook and cranny of the UI element. Its concepts are overwhelming at first, but you don’t need to know about everything to start playing and enjoying it. There’s also a quest based system that sort of functions like a tutorial to guide players in their progression, offering bonuses as well upon completion; However they can always deviate from these quests and continue on their own.

Epic Age's real-world waiting time element and daily login bonuses provide a sense of progression even when not actively playing, and the quest-based system acts as a player tutorial to guide players in their progression.

After a while, players can choose to base their civilization on a selection of various real-world historical civilization profiles, like Romans, Vikings, Chinese, Japanese, and many more.

Gotta collect them all!

One of the main highlights of Epic Age is the Hero Collecting aspect that functions like a Deck building game, allowing players to recruit over a hundred historical figures like Joan of Arc or Spartacus with differing tiers and rarities.

Players can assign them to lead armies, do politics, and more, providing extra bonuses into what they do depending on their attributes. This adds another layer of strategy to the game and encourages players to collect and upgrade their heroes.

Later on, Players will encounter other player settlements on the online world map and can battle it out, players can also join guilds to do politics and form alliances with other players.

Impressive graphics

The graphics are just amazing for strategy mobile game standards, especially when the heroes are displayed on the screen, with highly detailed character models that beats even many full-pledged PC and Console titles in the level of detail.

Being a free-to-play game, Epic Age is littered with microtransactions in every corner. From skipping waiting to brute force unlocking new heroes, a microtransaction option is available. This pay-to-win aspect does not bode well to the game’s balance between paying and non-paying players. However, this is a non-issue for someone who’s just looking to patiently enjoy a game non-competitively and players can definitely play this without ever spending a dime.

Conclusion:

Epic Age is a highly engaging and addicting mobile strategy game that offers a variety of gameplay elements — to the point of being too overwhelming at times — to keep players entertained and challenged on a daily basis.

The game's combination of popular strategy and deck building game elements plus its unique features make it a standout in the mobile strategy genre. If you're a fan of live-service mobile strategy games and are looking for a new game to sink your teeth into, then Epic Age is definitely worth a try with its free-to-play nature.

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