I was given the opportunity to test out Total War Battles: Kingdoms in its Closed Beta and Open Beta testing.
Here are my impressions of the early version of the game!
Total War Battles: Kingdoms (TWBK) is one of the most intriguing games I have played yet from Sega. It has all the complexity, strategy and challenge that the harder-to-run desktop only Total War games have, and yet it has the features one might expect in a web-game.
With time-based resources, building and healing units, this game is for the casual gamer who has a lot of time on their hands, but still wants the challenge that Total War games present.
Battles And Missions
The battles in TWBK are well done and require a fair bit of planning with the planning skills to successfully win a battle. With each unit having its special advantages and disadvantages, you must be very careful what troops you deploy against the enemy. This is because some troops are very bad against others. For example, Cavalry is terrible against Spear-men and Levies, but Cavalry wrecks Archers and Swordsman.
Furthermore, as you progress further into the game, there are new kinds of military challenges, as well as civilian challenges pop up, like doing Challenge Missions which are similar to a campaign mode and reward handsomely for completion. Some of these challenges can be very difficult.
A Timed-Based Game Requiring Careful Planning
Another main challenge is how to build your city the best way so that you get the most resources. In TWBK, resources are scarce and yet very plentiful as you have to carefully spend them so that you can keep your city going well, and expand into new areas.
To expand into a new area, you must either pay tribute of silver, or take by force the new land. This gets progressively harder as you go through the game, but it is the only way to expand truly because you have a limit of things that you can build in one area.
There are also some very interesting ways that the terrain works as things can flood if you are not careful.
Another interesting thing is seasons make a difference to the environment, dictating whether your crops will grow.
if you are not careful and lack planning, you may not have food in the winter.
One of the features of the game is to conquer new lands and to connect cities and as such; you build a roads into each city.
This adds to the realism of the game, and it is quite expensive too – in terms of stone needed. But it pays off by having more trade and more lands to control.
Optional Paid Add-Ons Included
Lastly, the game is freemium meaning there is optional gold which you can buy in the game.
Gold does not do much, but rather gives you the ability to progress faster in the game, or win battles more consistently.
For example, if you are chopping trees to gather wood, or mining rocks, etc, you can pay a small amount of gold to finish the task instantly.
Another way that gold is used is to buy battle support, or weaponry for your troops which adds various bonuses and abilities, some of which are permanent, and some that only last for a single battle.
A Free Game Worth Playing!
Overall, I would highly recommend that you try this game it is well balanced, not overly annoying with asking for you to buy gold, and just fun to play in free time.
You can now get this game on Open Beta on Steam.
I would give it a rating of 9/10!
Being a Total War game, the graphics are, as always, quite impressive. While certainly not Crysis level, they are very smooth, easy to run (even tablets can do the game at medium settings), and impressively detailed for the style of game. The only issues I had with it were the occasional extremely long wait times for gathering resources, or waiting for your troops to heal. Other than that minor issue, it is very good!
