Yes, because I’m an easily distracted sort, the fact that I’m playing Borderlands, Team Fortress 2 and King Arthur right now doesn’t stop me from finding more, MORE, MOAR to play. However, I stuck with the ‘doesn’t cost me shit’ category of gaming with this one.
It’s called BattleDex. I’m told it’s similar to the Advance Wars series for the Nintendo DS. Cartoony graphics sprites and a simple basic game design, but there’s a fairly solid game to be found here.
Create your account on the site, install the game, sign in to that account and play. It’s one part Panzer General, with a simple ‘build units at your base, move them out, simple combat engine’ design going on. You also capture resources to add gold, used to purchase said units, and control hexes. Those give you 2 points per round that you control them. One way to win the game is to reach whatever the required number of control points are for for that map before your opponent. The other way is to simply brute force your way across the map and clobber his base.
Units themselves are fairly standard fair…Infantry, Recon, Light tanks, Heavy tanks, Helicopters, Fighters, Artillery, Anti-air. A good force mix is essential, but you also have to match up with whatever your opposition it throwing out there.
The second part to units are the cards. Every game you can go in with 12 cards you can play in your deck. Some are re-usable, some one use. Some cost gold to use, others are free. They consist of everything from elite versions of units, merc units, buff/heal cards for your guys, and stop/nerf cards for the other guy’s units. You can build up custom decks before a game out of every card you’ve unlocked. Unlock cards by playing and scoring points, then spending points on decks. People can (or will be able to) buy cards, but unless they can pick up Indestructible Ninja Jedi Pirates of +68 Awesomeness or something, I can’t see that giving a massive advantage since the card decks you buy with points are randomly built, and the same will be true of the purchased variety.
It isn’t a perfect game. One major pain in the ass is unit pathfinding…it sucks. Pay VERY close attention to what route your guys are taking! If two of them end up head to head trying to go opposite ways, they won’t advance…they’ll simply come to a halt and sit there. And since the ‘undo orders’ command is pretty flaky, it can be immensely frustrating to have a light tank and an artillery unit stuck in the middle of a fucking map for the entire second half of a game because they’re trying to go through each other and their orders won’t cancel (not at ALL speaking from experience…). Also, the Recon unit’s voice when selected is kind of creepy…it’s like everyone else is a soldier, but he’s a porn star trying to molest you with his words. The voice actor was clearly going for a Solid Snake vibe (now that I really look at it, that IS a pretty porn star name…) but ended up coming off as a second rate Val Venis with a +67 to creepiness.
Overall, a very good free game. You can play against the AI through some training maps, or you can play multiplayer (which is where the better games are as the AI really isn’t meant to serve as anything more than a fill in). If you’re interested, give it a look. The graphics are incredibly light and the entire BattleDex folder chocks in at a whopping 48 MB once the game is installed, so it can run on pretty much anything. If you do check it out, ArcticBlast would thoroughly enjoy trying to crush you like the insect you are.
