..Impire..

Games should be fun. This is the unspoken contract between gamer and game developer when a game is played. Chances are, if a game isn't fun, you won't be playing it for very long. After several hours with Impire, I'm more than sure that it's a fun game and I genuinely do enjoy playing it. However, it does come with some flaws.

In Impire, you're cast as Baal-Abbadon, a greater demon who is brought to the realm of humanity by a bumbling sorcerer. Of course, being a bumbling sorcerer, he manages to trap you in what is essentially the body of an imp. Being cast into this diminutive form, you've been effectively stripped of your powers and are at the beck and whim of Oscar van Fairweather. Oscar is type cast as the bumbling villain, who manages to stumble from victory to victory on the shoulders of your hard work while claiming the credit for it. This could have made for an interesting power dynamic between Baal and Oscar; however, the characters seem to fall a little flat. While I was convinced that Oscar was only out to get what he felt he deserved, all of the joking which pushes the plot along was ineffective for me. There were moments where I found myself chuckling at Oscar's remarks, however, nothing side-splitting occurred here.

However, the characters aren't the essence of this game. Fortunately, during the actual gameplay, the somewhat boisterous personalities of the cast are relatively sparse in comparison to the time spent playing. Again, I reiterate, Impire is a fun game, you just have to really figure it out first.

When I first began playing Impire, I was somewhat confused. The basics of the gameplay came easy to me: use worker units for base structures and from those base structures, build up your dungeon until the end of the level. However, the small nuances escaped me and, because they weren't explained outright, I found myself frustrated when things weren't working as expected. For instance, I spent my first few hours assuming that priests would heal any damaged units, even though the priest unit still dealt damage. What I later found out was that priests only heal units within their own squad, so my initial idea of a four-man squad of priests left all my heavy-hitters dying during battle. Fortunately, Impire lends itself to applying what you've learned and I didn't feel especially penalized when I restarted with my newly found knowledge. Instead, things began to flow more fluidly and I felt like I was actually in full control of my dungeon.

(Continued on the Next Page...)