FREE GAMES REVIEW: Grow Empire: Rome
It grows on you…but should clear itself up in a few days.
Tower Defence games: get quickly bored by them or hate them, they seem here to stay. Whether it’s plant/zombie combinations, Final Fantasy or Arnold Schwarzenegger, games developers see almost inexhaustible potential in the concept of not letting a thing get too close to another thing.
Despite this, I still downloaded Grow Empire: Rome. I’m such a Roman Empire fan that you could probably put togas on the cast of The Only Way Is Essex and I’d probably stick with it for a couple of series — praying that their inconsequential robot-faced chatter might still descend into incest and stabbing. Now, that’s a show I’d definitely watch. We all would.
Like every game ever, Grow Empire: Rome is all based on leveling up. Turn your peasants into militia into legionary cohorts. It won’t cost you much — just bottomless underground oceans of time. Fight off wave after wave of barbarians, who inexplicably keep turning up at your main base, by deploying soldiers, releasing arrows and chucking big stones. You are then rewarded on a pay-per-kill system (a model that Uber has recently perfected) allowing you to save up your pennies and upgrade your fighting force.
Supposedly, the game follows the classic military rock/paper/scissors formula, i.e. cavalry beats swords which beat spears which beat cavalry but, since standard legionaries have “no weaknesses”, you’re far better off just spamming as many of those as possible. Yay.
Such obvious limitations quickly burst the Empire-building bubble. Take a look at the map and you might, just for a second, be lulled into the misconception that this game has depth. But this is no Rome: Total War. This isn’t even Swindon: Total War.
Capturing towns and upgrading their settlements at great expense give you a tiny boost to your income meaning that you can then repel tougher barbarians with slightly better troops. Rinse and repeat ad infinitum.
The computer will never, ever try and recapture settlements either, so there is no real sense of either war or jeopardy. Just your inevitable victory followed by your inevitable death, which should at least appear quite a bit closer if you were to attempt game completion.
After a while the whole thing descends into waiting for the reinforcement button to recharge in between waiting for your next ineffectual shower of arrows. It also isn’t clear, when releasing massive boulders into a mosh pit of fighters, whether friendly fire comes into play — though presumably not. That would be far too interesting.
If you like Tower Defence games, you could do worse than Grow Empire: Rome, as long as you accept that you won’t get close to finishing it, à la James Joyce’s Ulysses or a large portion of chips. The units don’t look bad and there are no glaring spelling mistakes, thus putting it head and shoulders above other free mobile games.
If you already feel your life slipping away, however, you’re better off avoiding it. Other people need to use the toilet after all.
