F2P Total War Battles: Kingdom Is In Open Beta Now
Fire Game: Age Of War
Total War Battles: Kingdom [official site] is my favourite name in videogames right now. It's from the school of game names where the words can tumble out of your mouth in any order and an equal amount of sense: Kingdom War: Total Battles; Total Kingdom: War Battles; Solid Gear: Metal Ground Zeroes. It's a free-to-play game, so I'm crossing my fingers for name-extended DLC. Total War Battles: Kingdom Siege Conflict, Total War Battles: Kingdom Fire Mission.
Anyway! Anyway, like the title says, Creative Assembly's "persistent-world strategy game" is now in open beta.
What "persistent" means in this context is that your battles contribute resources that you can then use to expand a home city, a la all those iOS games with similarly noun-heavy names. Your battles then take place in lanes, with the tactics focused primarily upon which units you choose to field rather than on hiding banks of horsey soldiers behind a nearby treeline. If this seems like a terrifying bastardisation of the Total War you know and love, keep in mind that this is a sequel to a previous game, Total War Battles: Shogun, and the world hasn't ended yet. While that last game focused on singleplayer, this one lets you (total war) battle with other players, and switches up the Japanese setting in favour of the 10th century Dark Age.
The iPad is lousy with these kinds of experiences, but is there an appetite for them on the PC amid the pantheon of strategy games? Any of you play the closed beta since it launched at the start of the year?