Armageddon Empire's future is your typical post-apocalyptic setting. Mankind has been nearly wiped out by a series of cataclysms (alien invasions, in this case), and are now trying to rebuild civilization from the ashes of the old world. It's cliché, sure, but i helps give focus to the gameplay elements, so the story isn't a large concern. And as there is no campaign or story mode, just randomized skirmishes, there's no need for furthering the progression of a story. It does exactly what it is meant to do: introduce the factions and setting and that's it. By the way, there are four factions. They basically come out roughly as the Humans, Aliens, Machines, and Mutants.

Upon actually playing the game, you'll notice one of the first complaints I had with the game: there's no in-game tutorial. Of course, you can read the manual, but nine times out of ten, players don't read manuals unless they absolutely have to. Some games, however, get around the lack of an in-game tutorial by having a very intuitive interface. Which brings me to my second complaint. The interface is not intuitive. At all. It took me several hours to finally stop fighting with it and actually get down to the brass tacks of playing a game. That's very much not a good way to please your audience.

So. The game itself. At the start of each turn, you have to roll dice to determine who goes first, second, third, or last. I actually really like this method of doing things, especially the expending of resources to add to your dice pool. There's a lot of luck involved, though, as I won against a computer player when I had 3 dice and he had 9. Resources are no guarantee for victory in this game, and that's one of the major selling points as well as a detriment to the hardcore strategy fan.

Whenever you perform an action besides deploying a unit or moving (such as assaulting bases, attacking enemy patrols, researching cures), you incur a dice roll. This is incredibly frustrating at times, because in a fight against two evenly matched opponents, it's really just a coin flip for who wins. The method of finding plague cures is especially annoying, considering how many plague bearers spawn and continually infect your troops and your troops alone. You can have expended countless resources and failed to find a cure because of a bad roll. It's a game that lends itself well to frustration.

If I make this game seem worse than it actually is, here's where we get to the good part: the strategic interactions. Armageddon Empires, despite its large focus on luck in the form of dice rolls, is a very strategic game. You have to use your resources to your best possible advantage, deploy units and move them around keeping in mind current resource count and other issues, build up your base, and maintain many special abilities on individual units. Thankfully, things like resource collecting and the passive unit abilities do not require dice rolls, removing the element of luck from that area.

Whenever any time a friendly and enemy army inhabit the same space, they will attack each other. Those familiar with Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!, or the World of Warcraft card game will instantly feel at home in the battle interface. You choose who attacks who, how to use special abilities, and whether to use fate points or not to re-roll attack or defense dice. The biggest changes to the TCG formula present in these mini-battles are just how exactly the units deal damage to each other, and how to determine which side goes first. Each unit has an initiative value, much like Dungeons and Dragons. When their turn rolls around, they choose a target to attack. Instead of automatically dealing damage, the player rolls dice to determine if they hit, and the enemy rolls dice to try and counter that hit. The more dice you have over the opponent, the more damage you deal. You can also expend what are called fate points to re-roll dice that didn't land in your favor. It's a system that smacks of both tabletop role-playing games and trading card games, and it's probably the one area where the dice-rolling feels completely natural.

I haven't even, however, touched upon the card game aspect. The cards represent all your units and structures. Special abilities are not represented as cards, but rather as abilities you can use on the cards themselves. The biggest boon that this game provides is instant access to each and every card from the very beginning. There's no playing to get new cards, or building from a limited deck. Your strategic options are limitless, and the deck editor is very robust, dividing the cards into groups based on what they do. For those who don't care about the deck editing, you can just use a starter decks, but for those like me who love the strategic challenge of balancing a deck's costs, strengths, and weaknesses, this is a godsend.

There's countless more strategic elements to the game, such as racial passive abilities, NPC factions, abandoned bases, stealth kills, and more, but these are elements that you really have to play for yourself. Nothing can describe the feeling you get when you take over an abandoned military complex and use it to mass-produce an army of powerful clone soldiers. Or the feeling you get when you successfully kill a plague bearer each and every time he tries to infect your army.

In the end, Armageddon Empires is a game that isn't for everyone. If you are a strategy fan, however, it's a game that has the potential to draw you in and keep you in its clutches for quite a while, despite its potential flaws. I have to give it my recommendation, if just for the fact that its sheer fun factor and strategic options make it a great game. The $30 price tag also won't dent your wallet too bad. You can download and play the demo for both Mac and PC right here from Big Download, and the manual is also available.