Assemble a team of the strongest Greek heroes to lead your armies

Battle on the world map and help your faction conquer more territories

Develop your city-state to improve your troops and gather more resources

The Queen of Helen was kidnapped by Paris of Troy, and by rescuing her, you not only have shown your bravery but also your ability to lead. As such, you are given a city-state to call your own and a title of Lord. However, the land isn’t as peaceful as it once was and a seemingly never-ending war has erupted between 3 of the major factions, namely the Thebans, the Athens and the Spartans, in the whole of Greece. Will you be able to fight and bring glory to your faction?

With such a storyline to start you off, Ancient War does seem like an intriguing MMO RPG/strategy game to play. However, being a browser-based game, it unfortunately fell into what I like to call the pit of “averageness” where many a game had faded into obscurity. Why is that so?

Well, if you’re simply looking for more of the same, where you’ll gather resources, build up your empire and your army, and then send them into war, then this game fits right in. The pace of the game can be quite fast at first and it gradually tappers off once you reach around level 4 or 5 of your City Hall.

The “building up an army” part of the game can be a bit different than your common MMO strategy game, mainly because it uses an RPG format instead. Instead of recruiting individual soldiers, you recruit legendary Greek heroes. Each of them comes in different quality or grades and also with their own battalions. Different heroes will command different type of units, this difference is important once you get into combat.

Although the combat in this game is pretty much automated, there’s actually a planning phase prior to battle that can be quite strategic. Here, you will need to arrange your army’s formation in such a way that you not only can counter your enemy’s units but also to gain a slight advantage over them… and it all boils down to the type of soldiers you field. Using archers against knights, where you should have used lancers, would be suicidal, for instance.

Aside from PvPing at the Arena or battling AIs via the PvE campaign, Sand-Table Drills, you can also take on robbers’ strongholds or fight to conquer city-states controlled by a rival faction on the world map. The boundaries of each faction change quite fluidly in this game, making the whole war effort seems somewhat real and very alive. This isn’t exactly a never-seen-before feature in the gaming industry but it’s quite the rare occurrence.

That was one of the two redeeming features of the game. The other being faction hierarchy. As opposed to many similar games within the genre, Ancient War actually allows players to fight their way up the ranks and assume important positions within the faction. In fact, if you do really well, you may even be appointed King! This is a really nice feature, though not unique, which gives players the incentive to help their faction battle the encroaching forces (other players) of the rival factions.

Being a freemium game, Ancient War actively encourages you to spend real money, or to “top-up”, in order to get your hands on exclusive and very attractive top-up rewards. Naturally, the more you spend, the more (and better) rewards you’ll get! This does skew the game to favor spenders rather than the free-to-play players, but if you work hard and put in the hours to develop your city and your army, you can catch up to the spenders soon enough.

Ancient War is a pretty decent, free-to-play MMO strategy/RPG that tries hard to provide its players with a couple of features that aren’t commonly seen in run-of-the-mill browser MMOs. The effort, although it seems to have fell a bit short for me, is quite admirable and well, if you love a casual MMO game to burn through some idle time, Ancient War might just be right up your alley. Try it now!