Recently we checked out the new free to play browser MMO from Bytro Labs Call of War, a World War 2 themes real time strategy that allows players to fight against one another trying to grab land and resources, construct bases, train up huge armies and make their way across Europe and North America in a blaze of conquering glory. Spending a couple of hours checking out the game we were provided with 200k in premium currency Gold to test of some of the features and get an idea on what the game had to offer. With a number of similar styles and themed games out there, including some from Bytro themselves, we wanted to find out if Call of War had anything new to offer to the genre and if the game was fun to play.

When we first logged in, it’s fair to say that the graphics won’t be winning any Academy awards, but the simple UI and basic look actually compliment the strategy theme, it was efficient, it looks like what you would want an overview of your war room map to look like. After a brief tutorial that guided us through the core elements of the game we were pretty much left to learn as we played, with information buttons dotted around the various menus and submenus it didn’t take too long to work out just what we had to do.

When we had created our account and were assigned our server/world we were assigned a random country from the game map, all of North America and Europe, with us in particular being put in charge of Sweden as its Prime Minister. The map itself is laid as a real world map as was in 1942, broken up into the various countries and then each country divided up into multiple provinces, players controlled all the provinces in their country by default when starting the game. Province control is the core of the game, defending your own territory whilst expanding into other rival players’ and claiming their lands, territories yield standard and key resources, enable you to produce military units, and most importantly some of them yield Victory Points. Earning Victory Points are the main objective in the game, the more provinces you own that yield Victory Points the closer you come to victory and you can potentially win the Round and end the game.

One of the big things that stood out when looking over our country and the provinces it had been divided up into was just how uneven the distribution was from country to country, our own had around a dozen provinces, some had two dozen and more, whereas smaller countries like Denmark and Switzerland only started with three or four a piece. Whilst this is accurate to the proportionate size of the territory and their real world equivalents is does make balancing issues interesting; essentially the more provinces a player starts with the more resources they have (including key strategic resources) and more locations to produce troops, with each province only able to create a single unit at a time, this hypothetically means (from what we can see) that providing a country has the resources the more provinces you have the more quickly you can field a large army. Whilst the larger your country typically the more provinces you also have to defend and potentially spread yourself thin, in truth we can’t see the advantage of being a smaller country as you are extremely vulnerable very early and could be wiped out just for a quick land grab. The same cannot be said for larger countries who would have a larger army; anyone making a move on their territory will potentially get the full brunt of a larger and more superior force.

What definitely defines the game as being a more long term strategic game is the pace at which you progress, lacking any real instant gratification the payoff comes from long term planning and flawless execution of your tactics, or the forming of alliances and cooperative attacks on a rival. For many the game will simply be too slow, it does require checking in quite often to choose a new technology to research, building to upgrade or unit to produce, the ability to queue your choices isn’t available for free to play accounts and is a paid for feature. So advancing your nation, building up an army takes a long time, as does trying to move it across the maps which can take anything from hours to days depending on how far you want to move.

One of the biggest progression stalling elements that we noticed, albeit didn’t disapprove, was that technologies are gated as to when we could actually start trying to research them, each technology having a pre-requisite Day in the round, with all players joining on Day One when the new map is made and the Round begins. Some later technologies take more than 30 days before you can research them, providing you have the resources and pre-requisite technologies to do so, which we felt was at least a decent way to stop players just focusing on one high level technology to get an imbalanced advantage. Essentially as the game progresses and days pass all players have the potential to pick up new techs and so will see new units entering the game and battles, so as things progress units get tougher and will essentially weed out those who haven’t kept a good pace and no doubt forcing a tiered land grab at certain points.

We have to say that the premium currency element does offer up some concern, we were provided with around $50 of Gold (200,000) which allows you to rush building and production, replace any missing resource you have that you need to use, even rush Research. After a mini spending spree we’d unlocked around a dozen Day 1 technologies, each of which would normally take a day to Research, in around 1 minute. From here we could pump Gold into buildings to give ourselves the ability to build both land, air and naval units and even rush production on them, using a Spy and spending gold for an instant mission (again, normally takes hours and hours to complete) to find out where my neighbours entire army were. Whilst we’re not exactly well versed in how combat would go, judging by our numbers and now superior units we could have easily taken out Denmark, albeit this might have made us weaker if everyone wanted to attack the warmonger, but that’s a big risk for day one free to play players. Realistically the pay to win element is there, at least some elements, it goes far beyond paying for convenience when normal tasks take so long to perform for free, combined with the lack of queuing it does feel like the game is deliberately difficult in order to force players to pay out some money in order to stay competitive.

The core gameplay and strategy is solid, and the pay to win diminishes slightly as you get a few days into the game, unless you’re prepared to spend a hell of a lot of money just to buy your victory (and there’s plenty of people who are). Realistically having already played Supremacy 1914 from Bytro Labs we have to say there’s very little between the games apart from a slightly reworked map and updated units, whilst a few tweaks and changes are in place the more mechanics are close enough that Bytro aren’t going to win anyway awards for originality with Call of War. The Gold situation aside, the game is interesting if you can have a little patience and like to plan ahead, otherwise it’s pace might be a little slow for most.

SCORE:

• Graphics: 4


• Gameplay: 7.5


• Performance: 8

• Pros: Strategic and tactical gameplay offering battles, trading and diplomacy to help claim victory, gated Research means players can’t purchase their way to a win.


• Cons: The game is extremely similar to the developers’ previous title, Gold currency has the possibility of making early game imbalanced, zooming in the map caused some graphical bugs.

Rating: 5.5

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2015 at 12:15 pm and is filed under Articles, MMO News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.