We Rule, Strategy Game Reduction

Until last weekend, I had been ignoring the latest gaming craze. Namely social strategy games, most known are the Facebook variants, Farmville and Mafia Wars. Since  I try to stay up-to-date on what’s happening in the multimedia web world, it was about time I dove into the genre to figure it out. I picked We Rule, because it runs natively on my iPod Touch, which makes it easy to carry around and play it anywhere I have WiFi.

Here’s what I found.

We Rule is a city building game, a strategy subgenre I love. It started with SimCity and peaked somewhere between Zeus and SimCity 4. In more recent years, it looks like only the casual game creators have  continued this niche.

Developers, such as Sandlot Games, took the genre and reduced it to its bare essence. They took away all the crud that had been accumulating and created the leanest version you have ever seen. The advantage is that the game is immediately accessible to any one, the disadvantage is that they become repetitive very early on in the game.

With SimCity 4, you’d need to be at least 10 hours into the game, before you’d fully understand the complex dynamic of all the zones and their connections. Most of the casual games take about 5 minutes. They do offer new and different buildings during the entire game time, but those are just visual replacements, with little to no functional differences.

We Rule builds further on this purified city building concept: your task is to build a castle. Money enables you to buy bigger and better things, which is pretty much the goal of the game. To earn money there are a few options, most importantly (certainly in the early game) are your fields where you grow corn, wheat, beans and many more vegetables (and some others, like rice). There’s also a large “role-playing” component, where you dress up your castle and its surroundings to look nice. But that part is completely optional and doesn’t really tickle my fancy.

We Rule has two things that set it apart from many downloadable city building games: a little social interaction (that doesn’t go deep enough, in my humble opinion) and the option to advance quicker by paying real money.

We Rule is a great game to spend the few minutes you have waiting for things (like during commercials). Because of its simplicity it takes no time at all to get back into a running game. However, the fact that many of the actions are timed can get pretty annoying. If you plant anything that will make you a reasonable amount of money, you have to wait between 30 minutes and upto 24 hours. There is one way around the wait times: if you buy Mojo you can speed things up (you do earn a minimal amount of Mojo throughout the game)

Is this game worth your time? Probably only if you’re into city building or similar games (Farmville). If you do play the game, be sure to add me (“PeterRules“) as your friend so we can trade.

Is this game the future of city building games? I’m afraid, it is for now. The traditional very deep strategy games (see Port Rolaye 2) seem to be disappearing. Except for Civilization V, there’s not much on the horizon. But who knows, maybe the indie game community will pick up the genre and run with it, as they did with platformers.