Releases of the day - Friday (03.04.2015)

I’m afraid I’m repeating myself, but the question remains relevant for me: which flies faster – the working week or the weekend. And while you’re thinking, I suggest you look at a couple of decent strategy games. Meet: Crowntakers and Dominations.

Crowntakers

Imagine for a moment that a simple Braveland has turned into a hardcore project with parts of the day, a crafting system, a fatigue scale, large inventory, side quests, but it has not lost its charm and humor. Presented? Great! So, Crowntakers from Kalypso Media is just such a Braveland.

Initially, Crowntakers was released on PC, where it collected a good press (70 points on Metacritic) and a decent number of reviews (51 positive reviews on Steam and 21 negative). It’s too early to say what ratings the game will collect on mobile platforms, but it can be noted that the desktop legacy, unfortunately, is clearly felt. Of course, everything is not as bad as it could be, but a game with far from the most intuitive UI, it was necessary to get at least a good tutorial, not to mention getting rid of the “Save and exit” button, which puts you in a stupor.

The game is available only in the iPad version, costs $4.99.

Dominations

Today we have already talked a little about the project of Brian Reynolds, the lead designer of Dominations, but as part of the “Releases of the Day”, let’s focus on it again.

Dominations is a clone of Clash of Clans loaded with Age of Empires chips with a choice of national “skins” for its base.

Despite this, the game deserves attention. Firstly, because she is very beautiful. Secondly, because it really has a lot of interesting finds borrowed from the strategies of the noughties.

For example, caravans and paths act as a generator of gold. In the event that the road connects the Townhall with any building, the road generates 10% more gold. Or here’s a good point: when a certain level is reached, the player can build a wonder of the world. He is given a choice between several, he will not be allowed to build everything. Each of the wonders of the world has its own permanent bonus. So it turns out that the choice will partly determine your entire subsequent strategy. As part of a PvP game, this is a curious moment.

Dominations is spoiled by terrible AI and an unbalanced economy (starting at level 10, I simply had nowhere to put resources, the only thing I lacked was hard currency to accelerate construction). Perhaps, during the soft launch, these problems were solved, but in January-February of this year they were relevant, However, now the game is in 62nd place in the Canadian box office top of the iPhone App Store (Overall).

With ratings in the App Store and Google Play, the situation is about the following: a lot of fives and ones.

Most of the negative reviews both there and there are related to the unstable operation of the application (does not start, buggy, throws out, and so on).