Barbarians MMORPG

Barbarians

MMO Genre: F2P MMO Strategy
Platform Availability: Browser
Developed By: Plinga

This free to play browser MMO sees players taking control of their own barbarian fortress, pitted against challenging AI and other players to try and destroy their bases, reap the rewards, and climb the ranks to become the most nefarious and notorious barbarian around. Barbarians is a strategic MMO where players must build up their own base, equip it with various defenses and raise a Barbarian horde to ransack other players bases in tactical real time combat. The graphics are colourful and cartoony and extremely well done, the detailed pixel based graphics, atmospheric music and sound effects all add to an enjoyable experience.

The falls into two game types, a city building MMO where players must level up and unlock various new buildings to construct within their own private base, everything from barracks, resource gathering structures, storage and defenses such as catapults and crossbows; players are limited to how many structures and upgrades they can build at any one time by the number of Workers they have available (which requires spending Crystals to gain more). On the other hand players must raise an army of barbarians, from Knights, Thieves, Archers and more and send them off to attack enemy bases, fight past their defenses and try to destroy buildings to gain as many resources as possible before your troops are killed, all the structures are destroyed, or the time limit is up. Similarly players will be able to attack your base and do the same, so having good defenses is vital to survival.

There are three primary currencies in the game: Wood, Gold and Crystals. Wood and Gold are standard currency with Wood acquired from the Wood Saw and Gold acquired from the Mine, both being buildings that players can construct in their base. When these resources are harvested players must actively click the respective buildings to move the resources into their storage where they can spend them on constructing other buildings, upgrading existing buildings, training units, removing rocks and bushes to expand their territory, and more. Resources can also be gained either through completing Quests given by the game, such as telling you to construct a particular building or train certain units, as well as attacking enemies and raiding their bases.

Crystals are a premium currency item that can be acquired either through levelling up and completing Challenges such as “Get 100 Fame” or “Steal 100000 Gold From Other Players”, or alternatively players can spend real money to purchase bundles of Crystals. When acquired these Crystals can be spent to purchase unique buildings, units, cards as well as speeding up production on building and training.

Combat itself is relatively simple and mostly automated, when choosing your target players can check out a targets base prior to an attack, and when they launch their raid they will get a quick overview of the layout of the enemy base and have a few seconds to decide what tactics they wish to employ. From here players can select their available units and place them individually around the perimeter of the target base and the units will then become completely automated, prioritising certain actions or buildings but otherwise being completely out of the players control from that point. Players earn stars (three maximum) for how well they have raided a base, which grants them extra rewards and XP and promotes them further up the leader-board where they compete with other players for the top spot and the prizes it gives.

Barbarians also includes an interesting building called the Fun Fair, which is available by default and doesn’t require construction, from it players are able to look over and purchase a variety of cards that can help them in the game. The cards can either be purchased with Crystals as a single purchase that lasts forever, or with Stones that are acquired through PVP and last for 7 days. These cards offer a variety of bonuses from increased resource production, improved health on defenses and structures, increased attack damage from units and more, and players are able to activate these cards for a time to give themselves and advantage. Players need to acquire Fame to unlock extra card slots so that they can have more than one card active at any one time, with a maximum of 4 active cards available.