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Saturday, March 12, 2022
Rise of Cultures
For about a year, I have been playing Shop Titans on Steam and iPad. Steam says I have been playing for 3,742 hours, which gives a very wrong impression. In reality Shop Titans just runs in the background on my PC while I do other stuff, and from time to time I switch to that window, click a few buttons, and go back to whatever else I was doing. But anyway, I am level 71 now, and progress has slowed to a crawl. My heroes are all maxed out, I have all the recipes you can get without buying them with real money, and the buildings of my guild are all at a level where the next level seems unobtainable. Time to stop playing this.
This would seem like not much of a problem. Aren't there nearly a million of games on the App Store that I could play instead? Yeah, but the overwhelming majority of those games are utter shit. It is really, really hard to find a game that isn't just a facade designed to get your money, while offering only trivial or ripped-off gameplay. And compared to Steam, the curation and review system on the App Store is basically non-existing. Even a Google search for good mobile games brings up mostly drivel from sites that have been paid to promote the more successful exploitative games. I have yet to find a good way to identify decent games on the app store, other than stumbling onto them by pure chance.
I do like for example city building games. But the large majority of those on the App Store are PvP games. Simple business model: You can play for free, in which case you are the content, the target for other players to attack and plunder; or you can spend a fortune to be the one who plunders other. Because players are busy with each other, the developers don't need to actually provide much content. A complete scam.
So I was very happy to discover Rise of Cultures. Despite a name that seems assembled from the names of those PvP city building games, Rise of Cultures is actually a pure PvE game. It has actual gameplay and content. There is a city-building part, where you need to arrange your buildings in a way that the building that provide "happiness" are strategically placed to boost the production of your other buildings. Then there is a PvE battle part, where you conquer regions, which ends up giving you more expansions for you city. You can also group up with up to 20 players into an alliance, and there is a PvE treasure hunt event every week to do together. And while there are certainly ways to spend money to progress faster, you can perfectly play for free without other players just plundering your city.
I don't know how long Rise of Cultures will be entertaining. You advance your city from one "historic" age to the next, starting in the bronze age. I made some progress, joined a nice guild, and am currently quite happy with the game, after having played for about 2 weeks. I assume that at one point in time the content will run out, but that is okay.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:30 PM Permanent Link
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Gave it a try - but it is not my type of game.
Even though it may be better than the majority of mobile games, I really dislike the idea of not being able to play whenever I can or want, but instead I have to wait for some "energy" to recharge. And the feeling of having to check the game regularly, to see if some building has finally finished upgrading, so you can as soon as possible click it and start earning some resource on a higher rate - otherwise you will be missing on all those "free" income.
Over this I definitely prefer for example the survival RPG games from Bew Games (The Lost Treasure, The Lost Treasure, Lost in Time), or the Civ-like Polytopia game, or a decent port of beloved PC game like Planescape: Torment. All of those I can play on my own schedule, instead of having the game "play me".
Even though it may be better than the majority of mobile games, I really dislike the idea of not being able to play whenever I can or want, but instead I have to wait for some "energy" to recharge. And the feeling of having to check the game regularly, to see if some building has finally finished upgrading, so you can as soon as possible click it and start earning some resource on a higher rate - otherwise you will be missing on all those "free" income.
Over this I definitely prefer for example the survival RPG games from Bew Games (The Lost Treasure, The Lost Treasure, Lost in Time), or the Civ-like Polytopia game, or a decent port of beloved PC game like Planescape: Torment. All of those I can play on my own schedule, instead of having the game "play me".
Tobold, did you try Knighthood yet? I played it for over an year, it’s a F2P turn base fantasy rpg with a decent enough story, mostly PVE. The PVP arena is optional and you play against bots simulating another player, i found it fun. Tell us if you found it entertaining. Thanks for the posts, I have been reading since your WoW days.
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