Oh So Much News

I was checking bbgsite today, as I usually do. So much news!

There’s an article about a game “Human, 10000 BC” which is compared to a browser-based Starcraft II. Oddly enough, there’s no link to the game, no mention of who is making the game (even though the unnamed producer is quoted), and a Google search for “Human, 10000 BC” yields nothing save the article. Perhaps everything is still in Chinese?

Lord of Ultima has now moved to Open Beta! Looking forward to finally getting a peak at what EA has to offer the OSG community.

BBGSite posted a War of Legends review and has more info on Mech Hero, which I’m still playing in attempts to get a review out.

They also spontaneously added my review of Nemexia to their site. I guess I’m honored?

Cheers,
Oliver

Nemexia Review

Game Site: nemexia.com
Developer: XS Software

Nemexia is a space themed OSG that inroduces some interesting game concepts to the genre.

Players pick from one of three races, the Confederation (Humans), Terteths (Robots), or the Noxis (Aliens), and control a planet. It has the traditional OSG concepts of resource management, building construction, and raising an army, which makes it very accessable. In addition to the 3 main resources (Metal, Minerals, Gas), there is also Energy. Energy isn’t generated per hour like most resources, but is used as a constant cap for building construction. For example, if you have a Solar Plant that grants 10 Energy, and each buildings costs 1 Energy, you can only build 10 buildings. If you demolish one of your buildings you’d have 1 Energy again, and so on. It functions very similarly to population in Khan Wars.

Nemexia divides each planet into three zones, Resources, Industry, and Government, and these have prominant links for easy navigation. My only qualm about the zones is that sometimes they don’t make much sense. For example, the Vault, which stores Ships, is placed in the Resource Zone, and sometimes the game refers to the Government zone as the Military Zone.

The energy system gets more intersting later in the game. Each player’s Planet is part of a Galaxy, much like Islands in Ikariam. The Solar Plants that give you energy are based off the Galaxy’s sun, which grow old over time and give less energy. To win the game an alliance has to harvest crystals from suns by attacking it. Each successful attack reduces the sun’s energy, so all Players in that galaxy are going to want to defend their sun.

Each planet also has an Ozone Layer, which is damaged daily with each building level and can be repaired by researching Ecology.

I found the main downside of the game to be the Tutorial. It’s poorly designed and poorly tanslated. Instead of checking whether you’ve completed a task it assigns you, the game just hides little puzzle piece icons in the UI that you have to find next to what you’re supposed to click on. They also don’t even mention Energy. The first task was to construct my resource fields (Metal Bot, Gas Probe, Mineral Bot), but you can’t build them all without increasing your energy with a Solar Plant. It didn’t take me long to figure it out, but they really need to redo the tutorial to explain all the new game concepts and make it a little more user-friendly.

Another drawback of the game is the Planet view. Each of the Zones (Resource Zone, etc) is pretty much a barren wasteland that you plop cold buildings onto. There’s no sense of life to it, which isn’t very appealing.

There are other little things; currently in the shipyard clicking on a ship you want to construct pops up a beautiful image of the ship, but it really should display the unit’s attack, defense, etc. Hopefully this will come in time.

Despite these shortcoming Nemexia is a well-built game that introduces interesting and fun concepts to the space themed OSG.