Freemium games, the scourge of mobile gaming. While being a legit business model, free-to-play games are almost always plagued with in-app purchases and resource-based timer that at best, make playing a chore—and at worst, make games unplayable. My biggest problem with these games are not that they’re never truly free, but that they have the potential to be good games. It’s the biggest buzzkill in the world when you’re starting to enjoy a game, and then run into a paywall that only ever offers a temporary solution in the form of $4.99. For me, these sly practices are unforgivable and ruin a game before they ever really have a chance to garner my interest. But I still play them, because I think that I owe it to other gamers, that I should warn them and their credit cards of the lurking transactions that creep around the game, hidden in text boxes and behind impossibly high unlock requirements, which brings me to Rise of Sparta: War and Glory, an energy-based, free-to-play strategy game that sits comfortably between ambitious and mediocre.
Rise of Sparta has a lot of things going for it: The production value is pretty solid, and the games art and music do their job well. The game plays like your standard strategy game in which you build resources, train soldiers, fight people who look different than you, and reap the rewards, all while ensuring your settlement is happy and well. The game is deeper than most free-to-play games, and it was refreshing to see so many options available to the player. The actual strategy is simple — You start on a plot of land, where you build your city hall, barracks and stone refineries. The game assigns quest like ‘Train 10 Axemen’ or ‘Level the Food Storage to Lv. 5’ in order to earn extra resources, level up your civilization and unleash them onto the world. There’s not much micromanagement like in a more complex strategy game like Civilization, as Rise of Sparta opts instead for a more streamlined approach to strategy.
What’s impressive about Rise of Sparta is its online functionality. Players can interact with others in their assigned areas, where they can choose to ally themselves, or try and start a conflict. A global chat feature is also implemented and allows players to interact with others, and features a translate button so that other languages can be translated into your own. It’s an impressive touch to an otherwise static experience.
In addition to plundering other settlements, you can also enter Spartan Conquest, where you follow a path, attacking anyone in your way while trying to earn a three-star rating. Here’s where you gain the faith resource, which you can use to further upgrade your troops as well as pander to the gods for extra bonuses. Now you don’t actually see these battles; in fact, there’s not a lot of button pressing either. You select how many troops you want to send out and the game determines who will win based on stats. I just kept thinking how much more engaging the battles would be if we had at least got a glimpse of the Spartans in battle.
The title’s cardinal sin, however, is the way it uses resources to squeeze the player into perpetually spending. The game uses an “energy-based” resource system, which means that when you run out of energy (i.e. play too long) you have to wait to recover energy to play again. We have seen this in scores of mobile games and it boils down to a timer that you have to pay away, which is about as much fun as dental surgery. This particular freemium monetization strategy drives me insane. It wrangles the player’s joy like a dog on a choke collar and throws up a bona fide paywall. To make matter’s worse, the Sparta is full of in-app purchases. These largely appear in the form of the game’s “pearls,” a pay only resource that unlocks abilities and energy; however, to be fair, the devs don’t badger the player about buying these gems and they can generally be ignored. There have also been reports of the game locking up and freezing, or not even starting. I experienced this a few times during my playthrough and it was as annoying as you would imagine, but if that were the only problem this title would be getting a positive review right about now.
Overall, my problem with this game, aside from it simply being an average strategy game, is that damn pay to play energy meter. It really soils whatever good that Rise of Sparta had going for it. I walked into Rise of Sparta with low expectations, and was surprised that it wasn’t as bad as I originally imagined, but the energy-based gameplay keeps this from going anywhere beyond ‘whatever.
Hardcore?
KInda
Rise of Sparta is a simple strategy game that has its limited potential squandered by pay-to-play resource-based gameplay.
