Player Two: Evony

It seems like no matter where you look on the internet these days, the barely clothed buxom beauties of Evony are falling all over their Ads to get your attention. They want you, they need you, they are practically throwing their digital selves at you. Anything, as long as you click the link. Which will inevitably leads to….a free browser RTS? Wait, what? I mean…wow with the blatant bait and switch there Evony marketing guys. But hey, their team decided nothing sells better than a face full of cleavage and ran with it.

You can even type “Evony Ad Campaign” into your search engine of choice and pull up plenty of complaints from blue-balled teen boys everywhere frustrated that the promise of digital goods turn out to be a Civilization-type game.

Being neither male nor particularly interested in boobage, I let the ads slide with little notice beyond the initial WTF. After all, I’m grown up enough to realize sex sells and more power to them, right? Then around three in the morning one night, in a fit of sleep deprivation I assume, I decided to give it a whirl. After all, I’d played Ikarium and Maple Story and Travian. Why should I let the slant of the ad campaign keep me from trying this?

The answer: not a thing. While Evony may lure the unwary into its trap and trust me, there are plenty of “OMG WHERE R TEH B00BS?” scrolling in general chat, the game itself is a solid RTS.

The Premise:

A top down, browser based game, Evony asks you to build up your city through beginner quests that are extremely user friendly. Make your peasants happy with low taxes while working them to death to generate enough resources to amass an army. Use the technical trees to level up your walls, increase resource production, create advanced troops, expand your domain and generally cackle like the tyrant you are becoming. Make friends of a similar mindset and form alliances. Wage war with other alliances to pillage and burninate the countryside until the entire continent bows at your feet. Rejoice.

Good Ideas/Bad Ideas

Good Ideas

• Making the Game Free – Nothing pulls in the masses like a free game. I’m pretty sure if someone made a game where the point was to have your avatar sit in chair and click on the wall to dry paint, people would play it as long as they didn’t have to pay for it. If you’re active on your server, your little kingdom will always be there no matter how low you are on cash.
• Quests – Quests are the lifeblood of any long term game. Quests keep us coming back and they keep us from leaving until one more chain is complete. They give us a sense of accomplishment, tangible rewards in the form of loot and something to brag about to benchmark our success. Evony plays directly into this and exploits it shamelessly, going so far as to issue a Daily Quest that players can complete simply by LOGGING IN.
• Always On. Always Real Time. – In keeping with many free browser games, Evony never sleeps. When you log off, your minions keep plugging away, giving you a steady source of resources and gold. In other words, it’s low maintenance. At work? School? Sneak a peek for less than a minute to check your stats, assign a new technology research and a new upgrade and close the tab before anyone is the wiser. Going out of town for a week? Set your account to “Vacation” or let your alliance know to keep an eye out so you don’t come back to a burned out shell and some loser squatting in your keep.

Bad Ideas

• Free Is A Four Letter Word – Free doesn’t pay the bills or keep the servers running so Evonians (Evonese? Evonicans?) are constantly bombarded by in game pleas to use their hard earned money to buy resources or coins which can be exchanged for any number of temporary bonuses from reduced construction time to instant peasant loyalty increases. Which doesn’t seem so tempting until you’re one upgrade away from unlocking the next tier and you NEED fifty thousand lumber NOW.
• Evony Ad Campaign – The very campaign that gets a majority of the players interested is also a huge setback. Getting started can be daunting since the newbie chat is inundated with requests for a/s/l, cyber and and other denizens of the internet that haven’t quite grasped what Evony is all about. Finding anyone that is genuinely helpful can take a degree of patience that many just don’t have.
• Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. – After the initial rush, figuring out the basics and finding decent human beings that actually want to play the game, Evony becomes an even BIGGER exercise in patience. If you’re looking for instant warfare and grudge filled feuds, move on my bloodthirsty friend. Because real time means..Real. Time. As in eventually upgrades can take upwards of two, three or eight hours. Which is fine if you’re busy but excruciating if, say, you keep tabbing over every five minutes to watch the seconds pass on by.

Conclusion:

All in all Evony is an entertaining free browser game with a user friendly interface, decent graphics and a loyal community (if you can hear them over the rabble). While the slow pace can be off-putting, if you’re looking for a low maintenance game with Civilization-esque elements you can’t do better than what these buxom ladies have to offer.

Donna Donna DeRonde is a full time mother of two and an avid follower of all things video game or pop culture related. When not writing for the Amplifier, she is Head Memeologist for the Cheezburger Network; home of ICanHasCheezburger, Failblog, and her own site, ThereIFixedIt. Follow along with her daily antics on Twitter as MildlyAmused.