Battle Wallets
In gaming, it has become a sad truth that everything free comes with a price. “Play for free!” has become a ubiquitous catchphrase of this era of gaming, be it in the case of MMOs, Steam’s emerging free-to-play market on PC, or the wealth of freemium strategy titles cropping up on Android and iOS. Players are offered one of two equally disagreeable choices to pad the wallets of the developers: wait an unreasonable amount of time to gain access to certain features, or pay real money simply to continue playing the game. Battle Nations is just another one of the many games on the market engaging in such unsavory business practices.
Battle Nations is a strategy game available for free download on mobile devices, tablets, and PC. Its gameplay is not unlike other isometric strategy titles such as Clash of Clans or Star Wars Commander. Players gradually develop a personal settlement, with certain structures providing a constant influx of resources and others allowing production of combat units.
Battle Nations has a substantial breadth of structures and units. Farms, housing, barracks, stone quarries, factories, and many other types of buildings each serve a specific role and allow for a wide array of potential settlement layouts. Units come in all shapes and sizes, from rifle-wielding infantry, to explosives experts and artillery emplacements, to heavily-armored vehicles. In predictable freemium fashion, however, there are certain buildings and units that are simply better than others—and they cost real money. Constructing units, building facilities, and upgrading structures all takes a certain amount of real time to complete. Unfortunately, the associated wait times can range from mere seconds to days. If you want to have your new soldiers or upgraded resource depot right now, you’ll have to buy more nanopods, items that can only be purchased using real money.
Once you’ve waited a sufficient length of time or paid enough money up front, you’ll finally get to experience Battle Nations’ bland combat. For an analogy, imagine a well-designed turn-based combat system in a game like Advance Wars, then strip virtually all creativity and strategy away, and you’re left with a close approximation of the gameplay in Battle Nations. During combat, the battlefield is divided into two parts (each side a grid comprised of squares), with your own troops occupying one side of the map and your enemies in the other. At the beginning of the match, you select a limited number of your available troops to face off against the foe. Once you’ve placed your units at the desired locations on the battlefield, combat begins in turn-based fashion: first, one of your units attacks an enemy, then one of your foe’s minions responds in kind. The battlefields are so cramped that movement and position aren’t really factors in achieving victory. Every battle plays out basically the same way: troops line up and blast away at each other until one side is totally wiped out.
Some units have weaknesses or resistances against certain damage types, but for the most part, the outcome of combat is determined not by tactics or skill, but by who has the more powerful troops or who has paid more to win. Thanks to Battle Nations’ freemium model, there are certain paid units that are essentially better versions of free units. The game boasts an expansive online PvP system, but one must question the legitimacy of such a feature if victory is determined only by who has the deepest pockets and least impulse control.
Missions serve as tutorials for the game’s many structures and units. Upon completion, missions grant a miniscule reward for the player’s effort, creating the illusion of accomplishment-based progress. Additionally, the mission UI is extremely frustrating to use. On the Kindle Fire edition of the game, even attempting to do so much as scroll up or down within the menu caused framerate drops, unresponsiveness, and even a crash to the home screen on one occasion.
Graphically, Battle Nations is adequate for the platforms for which it is available. The individual units, factions, and structures are usually easily differentiable and well-detailed. The combat animations and general art style are cartoony and colorful—it’s satisfying to watch an enemy unit explode into oblivion after a long fight. The overall design of the background environments, world map, and terrain, on the other hand, is lackluster. Ironically, Battle Nations seems to take much of its graphical inspiration from Team Fortress 2, a far superior game with one of the fairest F2P models on the market.
As touched upon before, Battle Nations’ greatest sin is its draconian freemium model. At every possible juncture, developers Z2 have erected paywalls to waylay players and have created a title which is decidedly pay-to-win. With its many time-gates, the game demands money before it will allow you to continue playing. Battle Nations simultaneously caters to the pay-to-win crowd, allowing players to purchase power and have it right away. Pop-ups appear frequently to pester the player, reminding them that they could progress even quicker and have more fun if they forked over real money. It’s worth noting that it is possible to acquire nanopods from certain missions and in-game events, but those opportunities are few and the return on time invested is negligible.
Battle Nations should be avoided like the plague. The gameplay is banal and hampered at every turn by the developers’ greedy freemium model. Combat is repetitive, one-dimensional, and does very little to reward tactical thinking. If you enjoy throwing money away to be allowed to continue playing subpar content, then this is the game for you. For everyone else, Battle Nations doesn’t even deserve a download.
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Hardcore Games - In gaming, it has become a sad truth that everything free comes with a price. “Play for free!” has become a ubiquitous catchphrase of this era of gaming, be it in the case of MMOs, Steam’s emerging free-to-play market on PC, or the wealth of freemium strategy titles cropping up on Android and iOS. Players are offered one of two equally disagreeable choices to pad the wallets of the developers: wait an unreasonable amount of time to gain access to certain features, or pay real money simply to continue playing the game. Battle Nations is just another one of the many games on the market engaging in such unsavory business practices.
"With its many time-gates, the game demands money before it will allow you to continue playing. Battle Nations simultaneously caters to the pay-to-win crowd, allowing players to purchase power and have it right away."
I have to disagree with your opinion of pay to win vs pay for convince. Pay for convince is when you can get to the highest level/most power faster, but once you are there your power is not any higher than anyone who reached it normally.
Pay to win is when once you reach the max power you can buy items that make you even more powerful using real money. This is pay to win because the person who pays will be more powerful than the person who doesn't pay and there is no way to reach that power without paying.