RATING:
Pros: Decent graphics with plenty of features and PvP content.
Cons: Tedious content, Premium Currency gives too much of an advantage.
Graphics: 6
Gameplay: 4
Performance: 8
Overall: 6
During the last week we spent some time checking out Soldiers Inc from Plarium, a browser-based free to play strategy-focused MMO where players are responsible for their own base in the war torn region of Zandia, working towards gathering resources, building up a military force and using it to defend their territory and raid rivals to steal their hard earned goods. We checked the game out for around two hours to get to grips with the majority of the features and get a well-grounded knowledge of the game, though obviously didn't get the chance to experience any kind of end-game content. So for our extended play through here's what we thought...
From the outset everything looks good enough, the graphics and general user interface looks good and has the right kind of character and style for the games setting, whilst it won't win any awards for best graphics (even for a browser game) they're more than sufficient. Similarly with the sound effects and music, they're decent enough and any loops don't seem too infuriating; time and effort has definitely been spent with the full voice over of tutorial guide/quest giver Mr Black... that said we did tire of his constant jokes after a while and it took longer to listen to him than it did read and so put him on mute.
The core gameplay is pretty much the same rote as other base building strategy games; acquire resources, construct buildings, train units, learn new techs (though in the game they call them "Contracts") to unlock the ability to construct even newer buildings and train even better soldiers. Soldiers Inc. is no different, interspersed with Search and Destroy missions where you target enemy AI faction outposts and compounds to steal their resources and occasionally pick up a few extra troops as rescued prisoners. The game has a "quest" based system, and by quest we mean being asked to do something and then getting a reward for completion, the quests are pretty much telling you which Contracts to unlock in the tech tree and which order to construct buildings and units, which is an ongoing thing seemingly and goes well beyond the "tutorial phase". Even after two hours we were still being guided to a specific build order, making a really tedious and linear game that even if we did choose to deviate from it (we weren’t exactly restricted to what we could build) we wouldn't get the resource/diamond rewards from skipped quests that we pretty much needed to progress. You do feel like you are on autopilot for a long time and just clicking where the tutorial arrow is pointing at, even after 2 hours (which had gotten us to a healthy level 18), we were surrounded by level 2 and level 3 player bases that had started at the same time of us but presumably spent no longer than 10minutes playing the game until they stopped.
The positioning of players when they join is actually done quite well, enough times we’ve joined MMOs like these and you’re surrounded by higher level players just waiting for your new player bubble/protection to end so that they can crush you. In Soldiers Inc. it seems to be a constantly outwardly growing circle where new players always start on the outer perimeter, so the closer to the center players are then typically the longer they have played so the higher their level, but also the further they are away from new players. The problem really is that as we were surrounded by new players with new player protection (until level 30 or for three days) it means that to do any PvP we had to send troops further in land towards more experienced players, plus as they were further away it meant it took a long time for units to travel there and back
PvP is relatively imbalanced in our opinion, players are typically going to be more offensively focused and early on we probably had offensive units three times larger than our defenses, so attacking people is great, but if they retaliate then you'll probably get equally as crushed. The main reason behind this is twofold, firstly that offensive units simply do not defend your base at all, only the defending units; secondly is that the defensive buildings (walls, turrets, machine gun nests, towers) all require Diamonds, premium currency that you have to pay for (you earn a little from time to time but nowhere near enough to stay competitive and well defended). This means that you are very vulnerable to player attacks as much as they are vulnerable to yours, unless you pay.
Frustratingly defensive buildings aren't the only major area where players will need Diamonds, extending the Contracts/techs at a decent pace also pretty much relies on it. To unlock a Contract players need to collect Referrals, every Contract requires a different number of them and players will be written a random new Referral for a specific Contract each day that they log in. When some early techs can cost upwards of 6 Referrals then it is an extremely slow process, improved slightly with the ability to be able to trade your Referrals with other players so you can each gain the ones you require to unlock your preferred Contract. Or you can buy Referrals with Diamonds, essentially projecting paying players far beyond more casual or F2P players.
The trading and negotiating and working together with other players is a pretty big aspect of the game, almost a necessary one for survival (not a bad thing, and not uncommon for these kinds of games). The biggest issue is that there's no regional servers, so you are pretty much thrown together with everyone in one server and so the likelihood of being at least near players who speak the same language is very small, though there's plenty of tools to say what you want to do (trade, attack a certain target, etc.) that don't require verbal or written communication, it is hindering somewhat.
Whilst there is the odd feature here and there that is quite interesting, such as the Referrals system which we actually do think is pretty good, we just don’t like that you can advance it with cash, the reality is that a lot of the content is pretty much the same. Whether you are attacking players or the AI the process is pretty much identical; choose your target, choose your attacking units, send them out. Rinse and repeat forever. As well as having the same content within the game Soldiers Inc also has exactly the same content and mechanics as its sister titles Stormfall and Total Domination. Each game has been reskinned with different graphics and names offering a different theme to players, Stormfall being a fantasy medieval style game and Total Domination a futuristic battle against aliens; it gives players a choice but there is absolutely no reason to play more than one of them.
Ultimately whilst the game looks decent enough and you can see the amount of details and attention that has gone into its creation, it simply falls flat in a variety of places, from strategically (albeit obviously) places paywalls and repetitive content; more importantly though the game simply just doesn't offer anything new that we haven't seen a hundred times over.
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