LordStrongpant

This game didn't do it for me. The developers seem to have put a lot of effort into the equipment, crafting, and skill system, which is complex and vaguely interesting. But the game is really let down by substandard graphics and a poor combat system. I lost interest before I really got to explore the game much and didn't try the PvP side. But hey it's free to play (not sure what you get from paying) so I'd say for anyone interesting in a post-apocalyptic themed MMO check it out it might do it for you.

A delight for fans of old-school Final Fantasy style (turn-based combat) RPGs. Very well designed and written game - it distills the essence of the genre with tongue firmly in cheek and is filled with humour. Not much replay value here, but for the price the developer is asking this is well worth a look.

TL;DR summary: Mediocre MMO exploit-resources-destroy-your-enemies strategy game with a significant social component and an unashamed pay-to-win business model. You need to get into clans and cooperate with other players if you want to climb the rankings, and make no mistake: if you don't spend money in this game you are just meat to the grinder for the paying players. The longer version: I've never played the Stronghold series so I can't compare it to that. But if you played an old browser-based game called "Tribal Wars", this is the same basic gameplay with some improvements and a .NET-based client. You are a feudal lord who rules villages and castles with peasants and resource production facilities. You can use the resources to build armies for making attacks against other player's villages and castles, defending against attacks on your villages and castles, or re-invest the resources to get more resource production facilities. Also there's a leveling up system that opens a technology tree to get better armies and production. Your villages and castles sit in a global map with many thousands of other players. There are bonuses for cooperating with other players in your immediate geographical vicinity. And as you gain power and level up you can try to gain control over geographical districts, which gives bonuses, but you need to compete with other players and try to gain the support of the lower ranking players in your district to do this. On top of this is another social layer of a faction and house system - factions are formed by players and factions join houses to attempt to gain global power. Games play out over months, and there are a number of game worlds that you can play in simultaneously, with new game worlds being opened up from time to time. So winning in this game requires producing lots of resources in your villages, leveling up, building armies, going out to plunder and conquer the villages of other players, and not having your villages conquered by others. On the surface your success in this game seems to depend on social and economic strategy - getting on the winning side of faction wars in your neighborhood and balancing the use of resources to attack, defend, and re-invest in capital to increase the rate of resource production. However there are additional ways of gaining resources and honor, and the extent to which you can exploit these ways depends on how much time you spend logged on. But when you are logged on, it's actually pretty boring. There's really not much to do but watch your armies to travel around on the global map or watch the timers count down for new buildings or resources to complete in your village. So there's a bonus for being online a lot, but being online a lot makes the game a boring (it's worse than grinding in an action RPG, because there's not even any action!) And this is where the one of the developers way of making money from this game - sell "premium account tokens". These are a limited time bonus - effectively a subscription - that automates your account so you can leave orders to attack, resource gather, and build while you are logged out. Basically you get a bonus that a non-paying player could only get by being logged in 24 hours a day. But there's more. You can buy "card packs" that give you cards you can play for bonuses like one-off resource gains and temporary resource production bonuses. So the more you spend, the stronger you are. In the long term there is no limit to the bonus you can gain this way. So if you just keep paying for more card packs you can gain close to a guarantee of victory. Add to all that the game hasn't been implemented very well. The client crashes or glitches from time to time, the UI is not all that well designed, and the server infrastructure sometimes gets bogged down. These issues aren't frequent, and to their credit the developers make frequent updates and usually manage to get rid of major bugs pretty quickly, but still there's a background annoyance factor from all this. Another annoyance - the documentation consists of a poor quality wiki. But at least there's an in-game chat system so you can always ask random strangers for advice. So to sum that all up once more: the core gameplay is a decent strategy game, but the gameplay model combined with the business model means the game is overwhelmingly pay-to-win. This game is ruled by paying players, and if you don't pay you will eventually be plundered and conquered by paying players who will be much stronger than you by the endgame.

I tried the demo and it wasn't to my taste. I was hoping for something with a bit more action, and all I got was lots of adjusting spreadsheets. But some people will like this style of "intense strategy", so try the demo you've got nothing to lose.

A well execute and enjoyable traders / pirates of the Carribean simulation. Play as pirate, privateer, or trader. Let down by the tactical ship battle aspect, which is OK but can get tedious and just doesn't work as a good gameplay mechanism. Also lacks sufficient detail and mechanisms for large-scale management of a trading empire, so a long game can degenerate into micromanagement hell. Still, some entertainment value here.

Highly entertaining hat simulator with a first-person shooter theme. Endless hours of online fun taunting your opponents and showing off your magnificent hats. Humor, retro theme, quicky cartoon-like graphics ... some will "get it" and love it, some won't and will hate it.

The multi-player is brilliant, highly-addictive FPS. Does particular well with it's 4-man squad-based mechanics - you are rewarded for working as a team with your squad but you are free to play lone wolf if that's what you want. Graphics is good, but not brilliant. Some aspects of the interface design are a bit clunky. And I became very bored with the single-player campaign and only played it for a few hours. The story kind of interesting, but I find these kind of linear scripted campaigns boring anyway. I just played the campaign for a few hours to get the hang of the weapons, then jumped into the multi-player.

A mediocre but still enjoyable "tin-pot dictator sim". Essentially a remake of the original Tropico. Beyond the souped-up graphics, there's been a bit of tiny bit of improvement to the game mechanics but nothing drastic. The addition of online features, especially the sharing of challenges (almost a "modding" community), is interesting and suggestive but ultimately shallow and a little disappointing.