Elvenar is a browser based free to play city building strategy game where players are tasked with building up their own army of troops, unlocking the secrets of new knowledge and technologies, exploring the world and recovering powerful relics. With its turn based tactics orientated combat the game has seen both some success and some struggles since its release, so let’s take a look at the game and find out why...

THE GOOD

Quality Graphics – The game boasts some great graphics in the form of artwork, environments, user interface, and animations from the civilians wandering around the player’s city to the exciting battles; overall the game looks great

Exploration - The world map has been split into hundreds of provinces using a hex based map system, allowing players to travel to these mysterious locales and complete various tasks, trade and battles that reward player’s own exploration efforts

Strategy Focused Battles – Using a hex grid battle map players must build up their own army from various troops and then battle against the AI in tactical turn based battles, moving their unit pieces around the board and devising their own strategy

Diplomatic Options – Whilst combat is a prominent element to the game, there is also the option to Negotiate with the A.I. to get what you need from them by spending coin, allowing supremacy without always having to resort to violence

Extensive Tech Tree – The research tree is a long branching tree of various techs that players will unlock as they advance to the game, providing various benefits to a city and a player’s army that can be customized to suit their preferences. The game consistently adds new eras to the game that adds new techs, giving older players something to work towards

THE BAD

Tedious Early Content – As players only start with a few buildings early on, they are forced to keep building them and upgrading, and cycling through the same content over and over with not much in the way of variety

Lacks PvP Options – Unfortunately, in spite of the cool combat system, the game lacks any PVP and is a PVE focused MMO; no matter how much a vocal majority of the community would like to see it, the developers don’t seem to be in any rush to add it

Increased A.I. Difficulty – A more recent update increased the challenge difficulty of A.I. making them much tougher, too tough in many cases, and for most it feels like a very forceful way to push players towards premium boosts to overcome the now artificially difficult content

Building Queue Times – It takes a ridiculously long amount of time to build things in the game; when just starting out players don’t have much to do and so the length of the building times makes it so players have to just leave the game as everything is waiting on a queue timer, at later game the queues for building are so long that it feels like another way to drive players towards premium to pay-to-rush construction

Ongoing Balancing – Whilst every game needs constant balancing as it naturally evolves, InnoGames’ efforts have been the source of much frustration, making sweeping changes sometimes out of the blue leaving players feeling like they have wasted money on items that are no longer worth it, and unsure of what to do next in case there is another huge balance

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 5th, 2017 at 2:56 pm and is filed under Articles, MMO News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.