In the process we’d earn Forge Points over time to unlock new technologies granting new buildings, features and military units. The basic premise is just to build up your city as best you can and conquer a PVE campaign map advancing across it with your military and taking over various new regions to gain rewards. Knowing we’d have to do this didn’t really make things any easier, we still found the gameplay design quite frustrating and even from the first ten minutes already felt locked in a grind. With that in mind we untypically spread our own play session out over a few days, knowing the game is impossible to simply sit and play for an extended two hour session as we normally would.

It’s the kind of game that you jump in and out of, grabbing gold and tools from your production buildings, queuing a few builds, completing a few actions until there’s nothing left for you to do, then logging out again until the timers reset on everything and you can do it all again. In many ways we came to the game new, but we also had a firm idea of what to expect staggered short gameplay sessions with long queue times. Having already experienced some of InnoGames other titles (Tribal Wars, Elvenar, Grepolis) it’s fair to say that there’s a lot of recycled elements of gameplay seen between the different MMOs, whether taken from their earlier games and put into Forge of Empires, or taken and put into their later titles with the likes of Elvenar. It’s an older game that’s been around for a couple of years now, with its initial 2014 release, and whilst graphically it shows, from a mechanics point of view it’s still quite current following the trend of a lot of other city builders.

Recently we checked out with fresh eyes InnoGames’ Forge of Empires, a free to play city building browser MMO where we had to earn resources, currency, complete quests and establish our own tribal settlement that would ultimately progress through the ages, from Bronze Age to the future era.

Forge of empires review