Finally a Facebook game that makes you feel like you're on Kongregate! See those blood splatters in the header pic? That's monster blood, the result of killing via explosives and projectile launches. See that array of buildings? That's a non-decorative arrangement I used to express myself, with concerns for both architecture style and radius coverage of my peremeter, which has been optimized - optimized! - to cluster AI paths into areas of maximum overlap. In this game I was allowed to make decisions which affected my success relative to everyone else in a matter that was challenging. Surely italics are better than quotation marks for placing "sardonic" emphasis?
Yes, the folks at Casual Collective, makers of really neat multiplayer experiences like Buggle and featuring the maker of Kongregate breakout-hit Desktop Tower Defense, have applied their hybrid of depth and accessibility to that "space" where traditional designers have feared to tread but where angels tread quite freely: The Facebook. Now you can open that book of faces and proceed to start breaking them by spawing groups of home-brewed monsters at the door-step of other folks' tower defense arrays. If you succeed in overwhelming you can raid resources in order to grow your tower-defended base even faster. They take the chestnut of setting a timer and coming back for a reward and granulate it to a wide spectrum of time ranges, upgrade this building for 20 minutes, this one over two hours, research this monster for a day, harvest some putty in an hour and a half of the collector will be too full to continue - somehow this juggling act, in contrast to the optimal appointment that games like Farmville or Cafe World offer, appeals to the epic-compulsive drive of the active competitor or manager-type gamer. However according to their chart, people burn out on that and the resulting ratio of daily to monthly players is lower than you'd expect from a demanding strategy game.
The PvP is pretty fun as you raid someone multiple times and they start hitting back, so you reflexively get into these petty rivalries with folks you've never met - would like to see more with my actual friends, structured local leaderboards, short-term races to a goal milestone, alliances and wars and tournaments. But maybe they can roll that stuff out, at 200k DAU they're pulling prolly like 5k a day so they're probably holding onto positive operating-margins with this thing and you're going to see some new stuff roll out over time.
As far as the early game goes, I admire their boldness in not folding to the mainstays of Facebook game design. The interface is kind of a mess from a "casual" (or is that casual) point of view, but they just trust you to deal with it. Most notably, the focal mechanic of the game, attacking other players, doesn't become accessible until after a few days of active play, they even give you 14 days explicitedly when you start up. This kind of commitment, as fickel as it may seem to those who have losts years to MMORPGS, is staggering for a social game.
A note on the "indie" or indie aspect here: these guys were indie at one point, they got some investment put into them - so has practically everyone else doing games on Facebook with a significant level of success - does that make them less indie? According to my definition, only if they brought an MBA on staff.
But hey man, at least we have a game where you can post a newsfeed that isn't totally hokey, and maybe even inspire some badass admiration as you start unlocking that hardcore, high-level monster and warn your friends. I Like that.
a really good social networking game
I've been researching online games on the Facebook for a month or two now, and although I'm not at the PvP stage yet (I could be, I'm just not clubby enough to rush into it), this is by far the best one I've yet come across.
Easily the standout feature is that it is not necessary to purchase (either for currency or by accepting some sort of questionable 'deal' through the game) the in-game 'bonus money'. The only other game I've come across that gives players who don't care to shell out real money to progress the game is "Nile Online", and like that (non-Facebook) game you are able to slowly accumulate bonus money through optional activities.
Overall though it is a rather well-put-together game; the mechanics are simple to grasp yet seem to be capable of rather complex interactions, the graphics are cute and retro-whimsical yet smart with a sharp edge, and overall interacting with it is rather fun, instead of the very abstracted, extremely grindy experience that typifies most of the games that I've found on the Facebook so far.
Great recommendation, the99th. I doubt I would have come across it without your review, although I have to say that even though we seem to have very similar tastes in games, to be honest the way that you recommend them grates on me. (In fairness, I doubt you would enjoy the way I review things either.)
so you don't care if Backyard Monsters has 0 ethics in design?
Make no mistake,while this game is ostensibly free,the entire thing from 1 end to the other is engineered to try to frustrate you to spending real money on everything from "speed ups" to "protection". It's excruciatingly slow & resource hogging upgrades to 1,000 Shiny for the 4th worker & then an unannounced doubling of that to 2000 Shiny for the 5th worker. So if you are not used to this kind of gaming chicanery, you might, say, go buy or save 2k Shiny (I bought $20 worth of Shiny (3000) and inadvertently spent all of it on the 2 blue dots called "workers" because of this bait and switch tactic). Another tidbit buried in BYM's forums is the little gem that people cannot attack you while you are there! They have to attack you behind your back when you are not logged on! Oh but wait! Then can you or does it make automatic (free) repairs for you while you are away? Why of course not! If you are expecting reasonable fairness in this game, forget it! While you can be attacked up to 4 times an hour, any repairs have to wait until you come back and click on the "repair" button, which in my case last time was 7 hours after 2 attacks! Then of course, the higher the level of the resource, the long it takes to repair them, in my case 45 minutes for each tower. Yet another tidbit buried in the forums: This one concerns town hall level 6. if you save the 1.7 miliion in resources to do this upgrade, which takes 4 days (Buy our shiny to speed it up now, y'hear!) and do it because you want more weapons and a significant amount of more blocks to build walls and 10 more mines that you've been getting with previous town hall upgrades, forget it, this is a bogus upgrade. All you get for your effort is 5 more mines, 10 more stone blocks and the ablitity to upgrade each silo to level 10..
comment about what??
comment about what??