While Ikariam was at least a unique concept, Ogame offers a browser game that people should pass up for commercial its competition.
The makers of Ikariam have not stopped making free browser strategy games, although their latest offerings have not been about Greek city states. For those looking to relive the glory days of Tradewars 2002 and other space strategy games, the video game programmers at Gameforge have offered up Ogame.
Unfortunately, Ogame does not have enough original game play to recommend it over similar games like Eve: Trinity Online and Ogame contains many of the same mistakes the company made in Ikariam. The free browser space trading strategy game scores over its competitors in terms of the montly cost to play it, which is nothing.
Starting Out in Ogame
Unlike Ikariam, where the player starts out as the Governor of a Greek city state, in Gameforge's space strategy offering, the player starts out as a planetary governor. Unlike Ikariam, where the city has a graphical representation, Ogame does not allow the player to see anything other than a text-based representation of what facilities are on his planet.
Like Gameforge's other offering the player must complete certain buildings to garner resources, which in turn are used to build upgrades necessary to start his trading career among the stars. If the player is of a military bent, he can build up his own star fleet to plunder resources from a planet owned by another player. The whole game sounds exciting until the new planetary governor sits down and tries to build up his colony in this free browser space strategy game.
Ogame's Flaws as an Online Strategy Game
Any free browser game is a good thing, but it does not mean that some games are not better than others. The fact that Ogame played in a browser windows means that the client is not tied to a specific operating system, but it seems that Gameforge did not learn any lessons from Ikariam.
The buildings take much too long too build and the time only goes up as the level of the building increases. Ogame's programmers do not understand that online games are not good venues for large and slow empire building games. The intent may be to make building a sizable empire feel like an achievement, but even the empire building games for the personal computer do not make the user wait more than a minute for the most complex structures.
Even if is the intent of the Ogame programmers to make it feel like building an empire is accemplishment, Gameforge's programmers should try to follow more closely the mmorpg model where things are done relatively quickly in the beginning and then take longer. The Gameforge games released to date make things take a long time to start and higher level upgrades only take longer.
