I love strategy games, it is by far my favorite genre in gaming.
There aren’t many good strategy games for Android. So I keep looking for a strategy game with some exciting gameplay.
But I never found any. That is, until I came across Tiny Token Empires. Now this may not be exactly the same as Total War, but it has a little bit of it mixed with gameplay from other genres. The others being Match 3 puzzlers and a bit of questing.
The game is set in Ancient Roman and Greek times and has humorous dialogues and cute cartoon graphics. The soundtrack is good too.
There are five civilizations which you can play as:
- The Romans.
- The Greeks
- The Persians
- The Carthaginians
- The Egyptians.
Each Nation has a Hero and many types of Units and Generals.
Game Basics:
Firstly this is a turn based game. And it consists of two modes, A Map mode and Battle mode. The map mode will involve managing your empire, army, economy etc while the Battle mode does what the name suggests,its where you fight your enemy.
There are 3 difficulty levels you can choose while playing Campaigns and the Free Mission.
The Map mode:
The Map contains all the territories that you or your enemy own. You will have to conquer and defend territories from enemies. On the bottom half of the Map Screen you will find some cards, this is your Army. Double tapping on each card will give you detailed information about the selected card. This works on regions too, just double tap on a region to learn more about it.
You can touch your Army icon on the map, represented by a Warrior token and drag it to any region to move into that region. You can use the map mode to see your economy, build new cities, train armies,etc.
Battle Mode:
To go to the Battle Mode, click on the Spear and Sword icon. The Battlefield is a field of various tokens on the board. You can match 3 tokens horizontally or vertically to make them disappear. Your enemy will also be matching the tiles. Cool, huh?
Each token represents a division of your army. For eg: The Green Tokens shaped like a horseshoe represent your Cavalry and power up your scouts. Orange tokens with the helmet power up your Hero.
Matching 4 or more tiles will give you an extra turn. The battlefield has two gauges, a red gauge which shows your life points and a blue one which shows your power points. the enemy also has these gauges.
There are three icons on the bottom of your Battlefield screen. Press the Flag icon to retreat, the Weapons icon to attack and the Arrow to bring the battle to an end with an automatic resolution.
There are currently only 2 Campaigns available: Rome and Persia.
The developers say more campaigns will be added in the future. The first Roman scenario also serves as the tutorial for the game. It is quite a detailed one and I suggest that you go through it to learn the game basics.
The game also has an autosave option and you can also save the game manually any time by pressing the back button and choosing Save. You can also save the game while progressing through the tutorial. There are multiple save slots, each one with a small description of the game you were playing, which includes the Date and time you played the mission, the name of the mission, Days played in the mission, the score. etc.
Besides a Campaign Mode there are two other modes for you to play. Free mission and Quick Battle. Free missions are like Skirmishes where you can customize the battle by choosing a side, victory conditions, the enemy, etc.
There are 5 various victory conditions you can choose in Free Mission:
- The Full Monty – Conquer all territories on the map.
- Speed Dating – Conquer as many territories as you can in 15 days.
- Megalopolis – Create 5 villages and turn them into 5 capitals
- Spoils of War – Bring five artifacts back to your main capital.
- Capitals – Destroy the main capital of all enemies.
Quick battles are random games which put you on the battle field immediately. Quick battles can get really hard.
As of now the only issue I find is with the slow start up of the game. It takes around a minute or two for the game to start on my Nexus 7. But it works fine when the game has finished loading. I have reported the issue to Herocraft and they will probably fix it soon.
AndroidPure’s rating:
Tiny Token Empires has great gameplay, humorous dialogues, and interesting campaigns. I’d highly recommend it for fans of Strategy games or Match 3 Puzzlers.
We give the game 4.5 out of 5 points.
The game is available for just over a Dollar in the Indian Play Store.
[app]com.herocraft.game.tinytokenempires[/app]
Note: The game does not have any In app purchases. Enjoy.