Recently we took some time out to play Plarium’s base building free to play MMO Stormfall: Age of War, a fantasy themed browser game where players focus on constructing their own base, training up an army, gathering resources, learning new technologies and competing against other players in PVP base defence as well as fighting the AI enemy factions.

Prior to playing Stormfall we’d already played some of the other games from Plarium and so fully knew what to expect, each game has the same mechanics, features and general gameplay but simply has a different theme so as to appeal to a different market of player. The problem is that once you have played one then you have pretty much played them all, and having played two of them very recently the game and experience were still very fresh in our mind. However, as a courtesy to the game to review it on its own merits we will try and give an unbiased review from the viewpoint of a new player that has played it for a couple of hours. So here is what we found…

Starting out the game doesn’t look too bad, the graphics and graphical user interface are all pretty sharp and whilst not the best looking browser game out there it definitely holds its own, similarly with the music the mediaeval themed tunes work well for the setting however there was a particular banging of drums special effects each time we completed a quest that was extremely loud in comparison to the rest of the game and really got on our nerves to the point where we muted the sound altogether.

On the surface it looks like the game has quite a lot of features, and in many ways it does, but the problem is that those features are either pretty boring, pretty generic or pretty much the same as each other. Case in point is combat, regardless of whether you are going up against the AI factions or against other players there is pretty much no difference other than the fact that players are usually quick to retaliate with their own forces. Players choose their target from the main world map, select raid or besiege and then choose the offensive units they wish to attack with, then it takes minutes or hours for the units to reach their target, attack it and if successful steal resources. That’s it. Essentially what the game bottles down to is a numbers game, whoever has the most powerful defence or offence will win the battle, the “strategy” consists of assembling a variation of units to best go up against different types of defences but as you can send a scout to seek out the enemy fortifications you generally know what you’re going to be facing and can send your troops accordingly.

One of the other problems is the generally linear nature of all the content, doing the same thing over and over in a cycle rinse and repeat, which as you may imagine gets pretty boring. The general rote is unlock a new Lost Art (technology), construct the new building it gives access to or the new units that allows you to train, attack enemies whether AI or player, acquire resources to then unlock new Lost Arts and do the same all over again in a slow climb to the end of the tech tree whilst fighting for leaderboard rank; and we assure you it most definitely is a slow climb to the end of the tech tree. With dozens of Lost Arts available, each of which can be ranked up several times to improve it, there are only a few deviations you can make along the technology tree here and there but in general there are quite a lot of extensive linear technology chains where you must unlock them in order to reach the end of the chain leaving little customisation for players. Unfortunately that’s only the start of it as to unlock a technology players require different Scrolls, parts of the Lost Art technology that you need to get access to it e.g. six different Smuggling Scrolls that you must collect , Scroll 1, Scroll 2, Scroll 3, etc. not simply six Smuggling scrolls but six parts. Each day players are awarded a random scroll and so as often as not probably are going to get a scroll that they dont want or need, however players are able to trade them with each other, which with a first look isn’t necessarily a bad system as it encourages player interaction.

The issue with Scrolls is when you get to some of the later technologies, such as the “Dragons Egg” Lost Arts, it has a 24 scroll pre-requisite… Now I think everyone can agree the chances of getting 24 scrolls on your own is never going to happen and so players will literally be fighting with each other all the time to try and trade with the limited number of available scroll parts, so even trying to trade with another player for them is going to be nigh on impossible. That in itself isn’t the issue for us, we’re fine with technologies being hard to get and only a handful of people being able to get them… but that’s not the case, as you can purchase a scroll part with “Sapphires”, the premium currency you purchase with real world cash i.e. you can pay to have the best stuff whilst the free to play players have little to no chance of every getting them.

The pay to win doesn’t stop there. With combat as we mentioned above when players make an attack against a rival city then their offensive force go up against the players defences, which is made up of units and defensive structures. The units themselves aren’t too bad, but they are far from as effective as the defensive structures and realistically without the structures player’s bases aren’t going to be able to hold up against most attacks. The issue here is double barrel, first and foremost you need to unlock the Lost Art technology to build these fortifications in the first place (which you’ll probably have to pay for the scrolls as defensive structures are one of most important aspects of the game so everybody will be after them) but more importantly is that ALL of the defensive structures also require Sapphire premium currency to construct. Essentially you can play the game for free, but if you don’t lose everything you spent weeks building up then the need to spend some cash to stay on top and keep paying it to stay competitive is pretty high. Sorry, we just don’t like that.

The pay walls and linear content are just part of the problem, in all honesty the game just isn’t that fun for us (but plenty of people enjoy them and this is but one person’s review), the content is tedious and the constant “quests” telling you what to build and in what order kind of forces your hand as to what you’re going to do next, at least if you want to reap the rewards of the quest and gain the free resources. Throw in the fact that the game constantly harassed us to invite friends in the game, constantly throwing up a pop-up, it got extremely annoying.

We do like the way that Leagues (guilds) have been made a core function of the game, realistically solo players are going to struggle and players will need to work together with others, even if they don’t join their League, to help defend, trade scrolls and resources and generally work together against other rival players. This is only made more important if you don’t wish to spend their money, which realistically is almost a requirement for endgame competition and so we would firmly place the game in the pay to win category, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t appeal to a lot of players in spite of the fact.

SCORE:

• Graphics: 6


• Gameplay: 4


• Performance: 10

• Pros: Strong player cooperative elements, graphics and GUI are pretty decent, plenty of features


• Cons: Repetitive gameplay that gets a little boring and isn’t all that fun, constant subtle pay walls hinder F2P players

Rating: 6

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2015 at 2:45 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.