I admit it. I’m an online game junkie, but I’m a picky junkie. I like my games to require at least a little thought, look decent and fall into the realm of fantasy or sci-fi. Something to escape reality for a little bit.
And let’s face it, the best way to escape reality in a game, is by playing a free game. Evony is one of those games that certainly meets those criteria.
Despite the odd name that I keep transposing to be Envoy, the game is rather fun, without being a total drain on your time and financial resources. Resembling an MMO version of Age of Empires, this browser-based game allows you to build towns, castles, villages and of course, armies to spread your influence across the world.
The world, in this case, is a flat tile system with names of provinces from our world all jumbled together.Friesland, Saxony, Bohemia and more are available provinces to settle in, but have no relation to those historic provinces in our world.
You start out in a random location as a feudal lord (or in my case, lady), with a town-hall and some resources. While there are plenty of "help" sites on the net for this game, the best way to learn is simply by following the in-game "quests" which will get you building and earning gold and resources in no time.
The game uses several interlaced "resources" that you have to keep balanced if you want to expand your society. Food, lumber, stone and iron are all raw materials you will need to build walls, armies, and more production centers. To run the production centers, you need population, which means building cottages. Which require resources, which require villagers and so on. The balancing game definitely gets easier as you progress, simply because you will get to a point where you become self-sustainable and can build pretty much what you want.
To make your efforts more efficient, you can build an academy and conduct research ranging from production efficiencies to troop and building enhancements. Those researches require yet another resource: gold. You get gold from your peasants, which will accrue naturally over time, or you can levy a tax or simply increase the base tax rate to get more, faster. Of course, like in real life, people don’t like getting taxed, so you will have to comfort them, or they will leave.
It’s this interdependence that helps to set this game above so many of the other free games out there. The other major factor is player interaction.
Remember those armies? Well, they’re used for a lot more than attacking the local barbarians (although that is rather entertaining). There are other players out there, and they want what you’ve built. While it is an incredibly intense and long process to actually take over a town, it can be done, and players often band together in alliances to help prevent being the next "casualty of war." Typically though, even if the masses at your gates can’t conquer your city, they will make off with significant resources unless you’re well-defended.
Of course, every army needs a general and every town needs a capable administrator, and Evony is no different. There are "heroes" scattered throughout the game, with many different ways of recruiting them to work for you. Mayors of towns influence build and research times as well as how defensible your cities are. The hero you choose to lead your army influences how much loyalty a city looses each attack, how effective your troops are and whether or not you get any bonus items from your plundering efforts. Heroes earn experience based on what they do and you can upgrade their stats when they reach a certain level of experience.
There are dozens of different buildings for you to create, with up to 10 levels of each, though you’ll need some special items to get to the final level. Those items can either be purchased with in-game "cents" or won through the daily "wheel of fortune" spin everyone gets.
Evony is easy to play at work (not that I would ever condone playing games while you’re supposed to be working *cough, cough*) and even offers a nifty little feature that allows you to change what is displayed on the browser tab. So if your boss is peaking over your shoulder, all he’ll see is "Sales Reports" when in actuality you’re trying to conquer the world. Actually, this game is just about perfect for playing at work, and giving your brain a little break between projects, simply because the pace is so slow.
And when I say slow, I mean near glacial at times. Upgrading buildings and creating troops are a must in this game, and at the higher levels it can literally take days to finish one job. And each city can only have one thing under construction and one research project going on at a time.
You can have multiple cities, but eventually you’ll reach a point where there’s just a lot of downtime. The one nice thing is, what’s researched at one academy is shared with all your other academies of the appropriate level, so you can save a little time there. Resources can be shuttled between cities and even players as well, meaning you might shave a little time off some things, and there are random items in the game that allow you to speed up some actions.
But this is a real time strategy game that takes "real-time" seriously.
So here’s the brief summary. The graphics are decent and virtually static, with minimal movement. The game can be played in your regular browser, and you don’t have to have some killer gaming system for it to work. It’s not a time-hog and it’s easy to play at work. Good level of interaction both between players and game and players versus players.
Downsides are that it can be ridiculously slow at times. There is no "build queue" that allows you to build one thing while having one waiting in the wings. While everything you need you can get in game, the "cents" system to buy special items requires you to get incredibly lucky with your one free wheel-of-fortune spin a day, or that you spend real-world money. There are several absolutely useless items on the wheel of fortune and if you get something you don’t like, you’re stuck with it. There is no way to sell or trade those items.
Overall though, if you’re looking for a little mental vacation while at work, this game is a fun and easy way to get it.