Previews

Hands on with iPhone's first subscription-based MMOG CastleCraft

My kingdom for a dragon

Hands on with iPhone's first subscription-based MMOG CastleCraft
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iOS
| CastleCraft

There's a growing band of massively multiplayer online games looking to suck up your time on iPhone and iPad.

Ngmoco is leading the way with its very popular if still buggy We Rule and Godfinger (still only available in Canada for iPhone), while Com2uS has launched the cute sprite-based IMO, and startup Spacetime Studios has gone all 3D with Pocket Legends.

Freeverse, together with developer Infinite Lives, is taking a different approach in CastleCraft. Currently only available for iPad - although it will launch on iPhone and iPod touch soon - it's a more typical hardcore online game that has you building up kingdom(s) by upgrading buildings and working through technology build trees via research. The point of this in the long run is mainly military. Big armies of swordsmen, archers, knights, priests, and mages, plus dragons, can be sent out to plunder the land around you for the resources required to feed your desire for more research and upgrading. You can also move your troops into the surrounding landscapes to scout and attack other people's cities, although there are options for making alliances and hence create epic battles across the server you're located on. (You can switch servers fairly easily if you want to.) Having spent just over a week playing the game off and on - and being a timid adventurer - I haven't got that far into the gameplay, so these initial thoughts are mainly limited to the kingdom building elements. Keys to the kingdom First things first. While Castlecraft is free-to-play, unless you subscribe (there are monthly, three monthly, and annual options ranging from $4.99 to $12.99), you can't upgrade your kingdom past level 2. This isn't too much of an issue as it takes at least a couple of days to get to this stage, so you can get an idea of how it all works. This isn't the best advertisement for the game, however. Things become much more dynamic past level 2, in terms of how the technology trees branch out and, more importantly, how quickly you generate resources and hence can do stuff. The resources are food, gold, and wood, which are generated by the farms, gold mines, and lumber mills you build. You can create multiple versions of your buildings, but you're limited to 30 slots overall per kingdom. Each upgrade option or new skill to research requires you to spend a certain amount of resources, which, combined with time, is how the game limits your progress. Another resource is Dragon Crystals, which operate both as a fixed build resource and as a speed up resource. In the latter's case, you can use crystals to speed up your research, troop creation, and upgrading buildings. This links into the game's in-app purchase model, because although you can harvest crystals from the map, you can also buy them - fairly expensively in my opinion at 50 crystals for 99c or 300 for $4.99. Putting this into context, even in level 2, some upgrades cost over 300 crystals to speed up, as does researching certain skills. Foundational That's all ahead of you when you start out, of course. All you have is level 1 castle and walls, plus lots of open ground for building. There are 16 types of building, with the more important including barracks, church, academy, workshop, and blacksmiths. Each has different abilities attached, so you need one of each. You also need to build residences to increase your population. To be honest, CastleCraft isn't the most impressive game in terms of graphics. Your kingdom view is a fixed matte background and, especially at the beginning, your buildings look fairly puny. The day-night cycle is also a bit annoying as it's not really required and night makes it harder to see what's going on. The biggest issue, however, concerns the flow of information. It took me about a week to get to grips with this. You should definitely download the tech chart and build tree .pdfs from the CastleCraft forum so you can see how things develop. I ended up with lots of scraps of paper, trying to work out which was the best way forward. Too much to do The designated way of dealing with this is the in-game Quest system. This is a pop-up menu, where three advisors let you know about the different upgrade options in terms of the three paths - City, War, and Dragon Crystals. These act as specific missions, such as increase population to 5,000, upgrade your tower, or create 20 mages, and you get additional resources for completing them. You have to deal with information overload, though. At the moment, I've got 19 open quests, and while they provide a lot of information in terms of what things you could do, it would perhaps be more sensible to only have a couple open per quest path. More annoying is the menu system. You can tap on any building to zoom in and bring up its information. The menu offers options such as Sell, Upgrade, and any abilities you can unlock from that building. Anything you can't do because you haven't unlocked the necessary items in the build tree are shown in red text, while do-able options are in white. However, you might not have enough resources to research those options right now, and you won't know this until you tap and bring up another menu. Highlighting things you can do right now with another colour - green? - would be a nice touch. In addition, you can't move directly from a menu to another building's menu. Instead you have to go back to the main kingdom view and then tap on that building. Two additional taps may not seem like much, but over time it does becoming fairly frustrating. Even things such as the basic identification of which building is which would be nice. You can bring this up if you tap and drag your finger across the screen but it's a little clumsy compared to the logical system, which would be tap and hold. Jester on the throne Many of my other niggles were probably more to do with my personal stupidity than bad design, although good design might have papered over the cracks in my brain. For example, I spent ages trying to work out which building controlled the ability Walls, which is needed to perform the basic level 2 upgrade of your castle. Of course, it was the kingdom's actual walls that needed to be tapped on. Doh! I also wasted a lot of troops attacking forests in the wider environment because I didn't scout them first. But you're not told why your troops were killed, just that they were. Scouting revealed hundreds of pikemen hiding in the woods: something that I could have been told about after losing one army, rather than three. Yet the fact I'm still playing CastleCraft isn't just to do with the fact I've bought a three months subscription. There are some parts I've enjoyed. The push notifications when a building or research is complete are good in terms of reminding you the game is always on and doing stuff, while the ability to create dragons has been a small highlight. Even if all it does is fly around the screen because I haven't tamed it yet, the fiery breath is pretty good. I'm also looking forward to having a big enough army to sally forth and do some damage in the virtual world of BlueBottle, where my kingdom is located. But the real reason I'm enjoying CastleCraft enough to keep playing it, is unlike We Rule, it doesn't demand your time all the time. There aren't tasks that always demand you to be doing something so if you don't log in for a day, nothing goes wrong (yet at least). To that extent, it feels like more of a grown up experience, and one you can play at your own pace. Whether this holds as I level up further and get more involved in the social aspects of the game, I look forward to finding out over the coming days.

Jon Jordan
Jon Jordan
A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon can turn his hand to anything except hand turning. He is editor-at-large at PG.biz which means he can arrive anywhere in the world, acting like a slightly confused uncle looking for the way out. He likes letters, cameras, imaginary numbers and legumes.