Pros: Very tactical combat, progression isn’t too fast, Auto-AFK mode is only good for easy grinder missions and not easy advancement
Cons: Graphics aren’t great, levelling up Generals and building the city is fairly uninspiring
Score: TBD
We took some time to check out AMZGame’s beta of their new free to play browser strategy title Elysian War. The game offers up a city building, army training RPG strategy that offers an extensive story driven campaign and plenty of PVE and PVP combat. The core game falls into two main gameplay avenues with its PVE concentrating more on the Campaign mode that progressed the story, and PVP which was an entirely separate system. The Campaign tells the story of us, as the player, being the summoned mortals asked by the Gods of the Greek pantheon to raise an army against Cronos and Hades who are looking to do some pretty bad stuff to the realm of Elysian.
The game does not set a good first impression. Jumping into the narrative it was filled with terrible English translations and the general look of the game is quite dated for a relatively newer MMO. To be honest we began to set ourselves up to expect very little from Elysian War and thought it was going to be another half-assed free to play Asian browser RPG that just did a lot of what we’ve seen a hundred times before. However, we were proven wrong.
The core focus is to recruit Generals through a summon/tavern type feature, spending in-game currency, materials or Diamonds premium currency to Summon a General. Primary summons were done with easy to acquire currency, Superior summons used materials, Elite summons cost Diamonds; with each higher tier of summon it improves our chance of recruiting a higher rarity/quality/power General into our army. Other features, such as the city building element where we could construct buildings and upgrade them, served little other point than to gather the various resources used to level up our Generals. There were lots of ways to improve them, but the mechanics of doing so were little beyond “acquire the correct resource then click a button”, it just required a different type of resource depending on which level up feature we were using.
At this stage there still didn’t look to be much to the game, but then we got into combat. Combat, unlike many of Elysian War’s rival predecessors, isn’t an automated bore fest of building troops and then sending them to fight themselves. The combat put us into large hexagonal grid maps and showed off a pretty decent little turn based strategy. On our turn we were able to move all our units around the map trying to wipe out the enemy, different units had different abilities, including attacks that would deal AoE damage in various ways. Archers would fire a volley of arrows on a large area of grouped hexes, Cavalry would charge in a line attacking any opponents in the way, Melee Generals had cleave attacks so they dealt additional damage on enemies flanking their target.
Moving around the map and positioning tactically is the name of the game, ensuring you don’t leave yourself grouped up to suffer an enemies’ AoE attack , or using terrain to protect your flanks. It was a chess-like system where we had to outthink our opponent whilst simultaneously trying to find fruition with our own units. Unfortunately we didn’t get to try PVP, but getting to play against other players would definitely make the game a success as far as we’re concerned (depending on the power spike of Premium Generals).
The Campaign was extremely fun and the AI was pretty ruthless, even though we were able to flick on Auto-Combat mode, it was fairly unpredictable and we lost battles as much as we won them that way. On a personal level we hate most AFK features in games, but having it so that it’s easy to clear unchallenging content, but worthless against actual opponents that require strategy is definitely the best foot forward. Some of the things we liked about the Campaign mode were that firstly it put us on some pretty cool maps, not just your traditional outdoor maps, but sieging settlements and encampments. Secondly was that each stage had its own Objective that rewarded you for how quickly you completed it. Whilst many were simply “kill all the enemy units”, some were specific to having a sole task of killing a particular enemy unit. In one such quest we had to go up against Hippolyta and her army and kill her, taking our 5 Generals into battle we were greeted by Hercules forces, which we also got to control, giving us a huge army. Sending the bulk of our main force straight the middle to take out Hippolyta we had a few flacking Generals to protect the skirmishers on the outside that could threaten a weakened back line. Corralling the enemy and baiting them into grouping up we decimated many of them with our priest’s sandstorms and archers volley of arrows AOEs. Over stretching and getting overconfident we lost a chunk of our forces, just as Hippolyta brought her unexpected reserves to try and flank us, but not before we took her out and claimed victory.
A little more progression and we unlocked one of the PVP oriented features called Dominion. The premise was simply a land grab, choosing where to place our city on the world map we could then battle across the region trying to capture small hexes of land to build our Empire. A connecting ring of controlled territories that included our City made our Empires borders, giving us control of all the territories within those borders and any strategic resource tiles. It’s a really cool system that allows some more aggressive expansion without having to take every individual territory, but once other players encroach on your territory and break your chain then all hell can start to break loose with constantly shifting control.
The game doesn’t look amazing, there are some really dull elements to the gameplay, but the combat really does shine. A combination of thoughtful positioning and trying to force your opponent to move where you can benefit from AoE attacks is highly tactical. The addition of terrain effects (that some units can pass through where others must go around) and surprise ambush encounters in the Campaign mode were very entertaining. Definitely worth a play for anyone who likes a little more thought going into their combat.
Deja tu comentario
You must be logged in to post a comment.