Forge of Empires Reviews

These comments are complete BS! It's all lies! The game really doesn't force you to buy any diamonds and spend your money. Sure, if you have diamonds, you progress a lot faster, but the game doesn't stop to be fun, even if you use no diamonds. I've been playing this game for a about 5 years. It's one of the first computer games I ever played. I've had some great memories with my friends playing this game. Now, I could just be blind, due to the sentimental value that this game has for me... Maybe I just continue to play without diamonds, because I love it and I stay determined and patient. But I've never really felt the need to get any diamonds to help me advance. People with no diamonds advance just fine! All of my friends played the game like that. Everyone is just fine today. And they never spent a single diamond. Now, as for the events... That's a whole different story. The events are specifically designed to make you buy as many diamonds as you can, which I don't condone. But literally the enitre rest of the game can be played just without wasting a singe cent.

The game is fun! It depends on YOU and ONLY YOU whether you're gonna spend diamonds or not. You REALLY don't need to. Just judge the game for what it REALLY is! A fantastic and original strategy game with a focus on humanity and its history (and don't even get me started on the city management part!). What other game does that?! Honestly, that's the thing that's been making me play this game for so long. This game truly is a gem...

No really. This game could be a lot of fun, but that's not its purpose. Clearly, FOE was carefully designed to make money: players that do not want to pay will progressively end up with a super boring and slow paced game so that they quit playing (freeing server resources). Business model: (1) advertise as free to attract many players (2) keep only those players that are either addicted to the game and/or that have plenty of money to waste (3) milk them as much as possible.

Enjoy :)

Inno Games is now using fraud (they call it balancing or mistakes etc.) to generate revenue from long time players, they would never touch the new players as they are the upcoming cash cows.

Just read their beta forums feedback threads (warning: certain peoples posts are just a waste to read) to see they ways they are doing this. "We made a mistake" so it must be rebalanced which also means there will not be any refunds.

The most recent "fraud", they pushed content to live servers after beta testing in which apparently the testers warned/questioned them on a specific building, along with support tickets and other forum posts. Many players like myself deleted our premium buildings (they pretty much get deleted each new era anyway) for the better building and now they are saying it was a mistake they missed and they are going to rebalance it which will leave all players with negative population and the nightmare of having to correct it without the premium buildings we had prior (space is an issue in city building).

This is the nail in the coffin for me, as all the changes/rebalancing over the last year has just been to further their agenda of making money. I mean who waits over more than a year to decide something is not balanced (this is specific to an artillery unit)?

I was not a free player and did support the developers because I enjoyed it, but now that they are just screwing us over left and right I can no longer support this/them.

You may not believe anything I write just go read for yourself (until they get wise and start deleting threads/posts again).

Run far away from anything by this developer in my opinion.

FOE is a huge waste of time. The gameplay is essentially very repetitive. If you play it, it will take literally YEARS to get to the final level (and they will have made more by then). Each level takes longer than the last, and each level requires diamonds, which cost real money and are unnecessarily expensive. You can try to proceed without buying diamonds (sold for between USD$10 to USD$80), but then you have to wait months to be able to earn enough free diamonds to do even the simplest task in the game. I was able to get through about 60% of the game after spending almost $2,000. Then when I criticised the way InnoGames makes everything so dependent on diamonds (I.e., paying them real money), immediately my account was terminated. Clearly, the idea of free speech is foreign to them.

Spend $60 on a new XBOX game; much better games, and much less expensive.