Castle Empire

I have played now for almost 2 years. There are great options for new players and old players. There are options for players that want to spend nothing, spend a bit, or spend a lot. To be at the top you have to spend a ton, but you can contribute to your alliance simply by sending troops for defense or offense, no matter how much you want to spend to increase power. Your troops fight at leader’s strength. You can contribute and spend zero. Find a good server and alliance and join.

The game itself is fun, but there are only 2 ways you can enjoy it without getting beaten to a pulp every day. You either join a major guild/clan, and hope they have high level players that are on frequently and are willing to retaliate or protect allies, or you pay out the nose to keep ahead of everyone else. There are no PVE only servers. It would be great if there were. It’s the internet, so there are a ton of jerks. The jerks often band together and beat on the weaker people or the people with no clans. Troops require a lot of resources to create. Troops die or get injured in battles between players, and injured troops require resources to heal…a lot of resources. Resources can only be gathered by troops. So if other players constantly kill or injure your troops and you can’t gather resources without those troops, you basically can’t play the game. Unless of course you are willing to pay $5 every 8 hours or $10 every 24 hours to get shields that protect you from other players. Yeah….its a money grab, pure and simple. Two stars for decent design and overall playability, and for a fun mini game, but the game mechanics that support oppressive gameplay is awful.

This game has some serious stability issues (iPad version crashes repeatedly but the iPhone version seems more stable) and numerous bugs once you play on the larger server.