Kami

i cant believe the lower ratings on this game, often based on paying for additional cards. with just one purchase of the retail version (which you can get on ebay for about the price of an average lunch) you get more than enough in-game currency to buy anything you might need. and if u ever run out you can buy additional copies and add their content to your existing account. in over a year of playing i have spent less than £30 ($45 or so). And for that i have got literally THOUSANDS of hours of top-class entertainement. Compare that to a $50 game that u get 25 to 50 hours of gametime from and then tell me which is better value for money. They say that these days its all about the multiplayer, and for me its all about the PvP. BFs PvP is unprecedented. its unique and exciting and gets my pulse racing like no other game.. and ive been a gamer for 25 years. And the beauty is it doesnt matter how bad or good you are because with the ranking system everyone plays opponents of their own level. Someone that levels out around rank 15 can (and will) have matches that are as exciting and fulfilling as somone that levels out at rank 25. Your opponents will always be a balanced mixture of those at your level, those just below youre level and those just above. And, unbelievably for an online pvp game against strangers, many of the players demonstrate good sportsmanship and manners. Losers often congratualate their opponent on a match well played, and indeed the standard concession of defeat is "GG" - good game. and to me Battleforge is exactly that - a VERY good game.

Hegemony: Philip of Macedon is an addictive, exciting challenge of epic proportions. After around 150 hours played i'm estimating i'm around 50% of the way through the content and its still not getting stale. Thats unbelievable value for money considering some major titles can have as little as 20 hours content. Theres nothing else quite like it on the market that ive come across. Expanding you empire with every border being a frontline requiring an army, and every coastline you own being a potential site of an amphibious attack, coupled with the very real need to manage your supply lines and food stocks, makes for total immersion in the game world with the need to make constant strategic and tactical decisions. The warfare is as epic as the scale of the game world. You need all your wits about you conduct combined forces battles using infantry, ranged, cavalry and catapults to siege a city, vanquish a defending army thats rushed to meet you in the open, or vanquish an invading army somewhere along your border, often in as many as 4 locations at once in real-time. The ebb and flow of battles is something thats often missing from many games. Once beaten the AI doesnt roll over an die, they come back in force, over and over. A city may well change hands several times before its finaly secured. Brute force isnt the only way, strategically cutting the AIs supply lines is often the only way to bring down a particularly powerful city, but then once you take it that means no food reserves to feed your army, and you know a counter-attack wont be far off... Ok Hegemony isnt the most beautiful game to look at. If the graphics were state-of-the-art it would be a 10. But many major titles are brilliant examples of style over substance. For those whom, like me, style over substance just doesnt cut it Hegemony is probably pound for pound, the best game you can imagine. As another player posted on Longbows forum: "The way logistics, terrain and resources shape strategies in hegemony is beautiful and a pleasure to play with."