After my post the other day, concerning a mobile game developer complaining that mobile games aren't taken seriously because people (correctly) assume that the scene is a "world of predatory monetisation and low quality", I decided to be fair to the chap and actually give his game a try.
The game in question is called The Battle of Polytopia, and it's a lightweight 4X strategy game heavily (heavily) inspired by the classic Civilization series, swapping semi-realistic visuals (aside from the city-sized horses) for a distinctive, untextured, voxel-esque "low-poly" look.
In The Battle of Polytopia, your task is to be the civilisation that comes out on top. In the default "Perfection" game mode, this requires you to have scored the most points by the end of 30 turns; alternatively, you can play in "Domination" mode, which is a last-man-standing mode; there's also a "Creative" mode that allows you to set up a game however you please, with up to three computer-controlled opponents (or no opponents at all, if you prefer) and the ability to play in the previous "Perfection" or "Domination" modes, along with an "Infinity" mode that has no win state. You can also play multiplayer, and the official website seems to indicate there are regular tournaments going on.
There are a selection of civilisations to play as, but the only real differences between most of them are the tech that they start with, the number of "star" resources they begin with, and their aesthetics — however, there are some tribes available as one-time in-app purchases that add some unique mechanics to the mix, such as being able to live and build in the water, having the ability to use magic, or an emphasis on poisoning and corrupting the land.
Once into the game, you're presented with an isometric view of the land around your starting city, with the remainder of the map covered by fog of war. Tapping on resources in the tiles around your city allows you to harvest them in exchange for the generic "star" resource, and doing so will add population to your city. Once the city's population has reached a certain stage, it will advance a level, and this usually rewards you with a choice of two benefits. These vary from level to level; sometimes you'll be able to expand the borders of the area the city controls; at others you'll be able to build special one-time only buildings that provide additional benefits; at others still you'll have the opportunity to "scout", which uncovers part of the fog-obscured map.
Some resources can have buildings constructed on them, which allows them to provide an income of stars each turn. Some buildings can be boosted by having other buildings in close proximity. Many of them require you to have unlocked a particular technology in the tech tree, which, again, costs stars.
Cities can also construct troops, which can then be sent out into the world to explore, uncover more of the map and potentially attack other civilisations, and the exact troop types you can build are determined by your unlocked technologies. Some troops can move further, some can attack from range, others still are better suited for a defensive role.
Other civs aren't necessarily hostile when you encounter them, but the game feels balanced in such a way that conflict will become inevitable before long, particularly if you want to expand your territory beyond its starting area.
And that's basically it. The game is easy to pick up and play thanks to it being considerably less complicated than the games that inspired it, and I can see it being a reasonably fun little diversion to play on one's phone if you want to while away a few minutes and don't have any other gaming devices with you. It's not obnoxiously monetised and it doesn't blast ads at you every five minutes, which in itself is worthy of praise in today's mobile sector.
But, I don't know. I played it and I felt… nothing. I didn't really feel attached to my little civilisation, I never really felt like there was much threat from the rival CPU-controlled players — although, granted, I was playing the tutorial map, which is likely set to the easiest difficulty level — and I didn't feel like I was making a lot of meaningful choices along the way.
The area where this stood out the most was in the tech tree. Simply unlocking features with the currency you earn each turn makes the "discovery" of each new tech feel quite underwhelming, particularly as in the late game you can unlock a whole bunch at once without really feeling like you've had to work for them or prioritise what to concentrate on next. There's no real "weight" to the game, for want of a better word, and that leaves the whole experience just feeling a bit unsatisfying.
"Civilization Lite" can work, as anyone who ever played the excellent but largely forgotten Civilization Revolution on Xbox 360 will attest. The Battle of Polytopia plays it just a bit too "lite", though, leaving it feeling like pretty much every other mobile game for me — fun for a few minutes if there's literally nothing better to play, but ultimately rather forgettable, and not something I'm going to go out of my way to spend time on.
And definitely not Game of the Year material!
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