Armageddon Empires

Post-Armageddon strategy games are not exactly easy to come by. This niche market has practically been sucked dry by other forms of media such as Mad Max, Terminator, Fallout, and the like. However, this fact didn’t seem to stop independent developer Cryptic Comet from churning out a turn-based strategy game such as Armageddon Empires, a game this is both unique and frustrating at the same time.

Armageddon Empires puts the player in command of one of four factions: the Empire of Man, the Machine Empire, the Xenopods and the league of Free Mutants, with each faction having unique characteristics. For example, the Machine Empire utilizes high technology, allowing the player to attach multiple weapons to a single unit. However, the Machines also have a very slow speed crossing terrain, a weakness that allows groups such as the Free Mutants to run circles around them with quick raids and suicide runs. This scheme is yet another iteration of the popular ‘rock-paper-scissors’ method of unit balancing. Nothing original here. Rather, the ingenuity of Armageddon Empires lies in the actual gameplay system. AE utilizes a fairly traditional hexagonal playing field for movement, but an uncommon card and dice system to govern units, combat and initiative. This gives the game a feel of Magic: The Gathering meets Axis & Allies in a post-cataclysmic environment. Indeed, it can be quite enjoyable to have the board-game equivalent of Terminator’s SkyNet to lay waste to multiple civilizations!

In AE, each unit is given a certain number of dice, which act little more than coins as the dice count as a simple win or loss without any numerical denominations in between. The more dice a unit is given, the more likely that it will be able to successfully attack or defend itself. Of course, the game mechanics get delightfully more complex than that. Factions must also collect resources. Players can do this by simply placing hexagon “tiles” into their decks that will allow them to create terrain that has resources readily available…but at the risk of having those tiles conquered by the enemy. Alternatively, the player may choose to scout the randomly generated map for resource terrain tiles and maintain a presence there to continue harvesting. Finally, the player may create “harvester” cards - units that simply deploy to whichever hexagon they choose and then repeatedly generate resources that way. With four resources plus “Action Points” – points that determine whether you can move, create a unit, create an army, etc – there is quite a bit of mechanical depth to Armageddon Empires that actually flows together quite intuitively. Pair this with a complex, challenging, and even diplomatic AI, and AE has the conceptual makings of an excellent strategy game.

Following the excellent concept for Armageddon Empires is the comparably great card artwork throughout the title. With the exception of the terrain tiles, all of the sketches and paintings absolutely ooze high quality imagery, very reminiscent of Warhammer 40,000 or Dune. It helps to keep things interesting as you explore the massive number of available cards in your arsenal.

Of course, if great ingredients are not executed properly, they really do not amount to much and this is where Cryptic Comet has fallen short. The first issue is in the fact that the interface is unwieldy at best and absolutely infuriating at worst. For example, on the first time the player starts Armageddon Empires, he is only offered a single faction ‘Demo Deck’. Naturally, the strategist will want to create a deck that more accurately represents his or her play style. However, the interface lags even when trying to simply add cards to the custom card deck. There will be times that the player will be wondering why adding a card is such a hassle for such a low-powered game when he suddenly discovers that the game has indeed added the desired card – plus four more! It’s upsetting to expect the player to actually have to count the number of times he has clicked in order to get the properly balanced deck they were looking for.

This leads into the confusing method of deploying an army. Going through the paces, one must purchase the units (costing AP and resources, naturally) and then place the units into individual armies (costing more AP). This will cause a number to appear next to the commander’s deployment point (fortress, castle, etc). Then the user must right-click that number, usually several times, then left-click the desired army. From there, the player can then select which adjacent tile to move to. Furthermore, the computer will not actually accept a multi-tile move in one click, as most turn-based strategy games have done in the past. Instead, if the gamer wants to move twice, they must repeat the process for every tile the player wants to move into that army. This is a great deal of hassle to simply move from one space to the other, and it doesn’t seem necessary, all things considered.

Another major point of contention is the blaring fact that Armageddon Empires is single-player only. It would have been only moderately forgivable had AE been hot-seat multiplayer, however, this is not the case. There is no network play, no hot-seat, no e-mail play, nothing. Here is a game with massive maps, a complex combat system and four factions to choose from…and no way to share the potentially deep gameplay with another human! If there’s ever been a game that absolutely begs for multiplayer, this is it.