Circle Empires (PC) Review

Throwing you straight into the fray with little instruction, the average player may feel quite worried for this RTS. However, the entire game is easy to pick up, and this design choice was clever to show how to play by a true trial by fire, and with only a few arrows as a guide. Throughout the experience one thing that sticks out about Circle Empires is how easy everything is. As a result however, this ease makes the game both approachable, but ultimately lacking in depth.

The gameplay is easy to explain: everyone starts with a 'circle' that is their kingdom, has a couple of workers, and up to three different resources - food, wood, or gold, with workers instantly and automatically handling resource gathering. Players can click and instantly build a unit anywhere they have control, and as there is no unit-producing building, players merely have to have the resources to make a unit appear with a click, and, yes, this means you can instantly spam an army if you have the money.

From here players can attack adjacent circles and if they kill everything in it, it becomes theirs. This unlocks new resources, which means faster resource income, which translates into more production of units in a feedback cycle. There are only a few units, and on some level it works. There is the worker, footman, archer, knight, horse archer, two types of wizards and a dragon. The last three are very expensive so it's almost always the previous units.

One of the grateful things they did is that workers both auto-harvest and are also not selectable when dragging a box to select military units. Such an obvious game design, and one that way, way too many RTS titles miss. There are some other positive elements in here such as that each unit has experience and will level up to a more powerful version, and that there are different 'heroes' of sorts to start with that give small bonuses. It would have been cooler to see this deeper, which unfortunately gets into the main problem of the game.

The major issue present throughout this is the lack of depth and, ultimately, replayability. For what amounts to a very thin story mode of hunting various bosses across levels, Circle Empires is fun and fast enough that it is enjoyable. However, this takes at most a few hours, and from there the flaws become apparent. The units are not very balanced at all (archers in particularly are insane with their multi-circle range and knockback), and there just isn't much too truly do in here.

The experience is streamlined so much that choice is ultimately ripped out from the one in control. There isn't really any strategy to talk about, short of something of "amass archers and move out, build workers, repeat." The scope of the game ultimately dooms it from becoming any sort of critically acclaimed experience. In the end it's a fun, short RTS romp, but it lacks anything close to typical RTS depth or breadth.