Welcome to your own personal rat race
Written: Mar 15 '00 (Updated Nov 20 '05)
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Product Rating:
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| Learning Curve: |
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| Replay Value: |
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Pros: It seemed like a good idea at the time
Cons: For the most part, it is one
The Bottom Line: You'd be better off watching paint dry.
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| seacow's Full Review: Archmage |
I remember playing this game a long time ago. As with many of the other people that reviewed this online game, I got bored with it. Why? There was no point to it. Sure, it was fun…at first. The point was to develop, protect and expand a city by putting up buildings and raising an army. You would hopefully conquer the world before Armageddon.
You started out with 200 turns and got additional turns every cycle. (One cycle was 20 minutes. The number of turns depended on the server.) Turns were used to build armies. Depending on how many military buildings you had, troops could be trained a certain number per turn. The problem was that no army seemed to be big enough. I would build up massive armies and do one of two things with it: Either attack someone and be defeated or wait for someone else to attack and lose most of my army. Another bad thing about the army was upkeep. If you built to big an army, you could lose some of it because you couldn’t feed them.
You could also spend turns exploring to gain new land. The problem with this was that as your territory grew, you would gain less land per turn by exploring. This meant that you had to acquire new territory by attacking someone, and as I said, that wasn’t always easy. (It would have been nice if you could have recruited search parties to increase the amount of land you got per turn, but no…)
The game was pretty much text-based and didn’t allow for any sort of interaction outside of battles, which allowed you to leave a note for the person you were attacking. There were rankings, but rankings didn’t mean much to me since I couldn’t figure out any strategy. (I realize now that I wasn’t alone.)
Surprisingly, Archmage is no longer around. If it was, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. I can’t give it any more than one star. The problem was that nothing made any difference. You could have the biggest army in the world and lose to someone with a lower rank. You could build lots of buildings for defense and have them all wiped out, leaving you to rebuild and get attacked while you were rebuilding. It’s no fun just sitting there, waiting to have the crap kicked out of you. It was overpriced, even for a free game.
Recommended:
No
Best Played With/Intended For: Multiplayer
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Epinions.com ID:
seacow
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Member: Brian Kuhl
Location: Biscayne Park, FL, USA
Reviews written: 1177
Trusted by: 135 members
About Me:
I'm saving up for a D300.
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