Circle Empires Rivals Review for Steam

Circle Empires: Rivals, by developer Luminous and publisher Iceberg Interactive, is a real-time strategy game. In it, you control an army that seeks to control all circles on the board. This game reminded me a great deal of the board game Risk, a board game where all players seek to conquer all spaces on the board through conflict.

You start the game by choosing a warlord. Each one has its own special abilities for either starting or a bonus for conquered circles. All warlords share most of the same units, although there are some units only available to certain warlords. For example, Axe Giants are only available to warlords with a barbarian background. There are at least 20 different warlords, although you start with only 4. You can unlock the rest by winning games as a certain warlord or by playing the game a certain way.

Each space on the board is a circle. Circles are linked to each other by bridges. Most circles are linked to the 4 circles to the left, right, above, and below it, although occasionally 2 circles won’t have a bridge between them. Aside from being the space where units are built and where they fight, captured circles also generate resources.

The type of resources generated depends on what type of circle it is. For example, forest circles generate wood and food while desert and cave circles generate gold.

There are 3 resources in the game: food, wood, and gold. While food and wood can only be harvested from circles, gold can also be generated by any bank buildings you build. To keep people from filling their circles with banks, a rule is in place that prohibits any circle from having more than one bank. To have more banks, you need to conquer more circles.

You conquer circles by defeating every enemy unit and building inside them. While most circles seem to have little to no effect on the units fighting in them, there is an exception to this. There are ocean and swamp circles that slow down and weaken any non-aquatic unit. This makes these circles near impossible to conquer with melee units. On the flip side, aquatic units can only be on water-based circles, they can’t move to any other circle type. This means ranged units can easily pick them off if they are attacking from a land-based circle.

While there are a great many units which could lead to interesting army composition, I usually found that there were 3 go-to strategies. A large army for taking circles, an army of ranged units to take water-based circles—those aquatic units would straight-up murder any melee units that tried to take their circle—and an army of Axe and Maul Giants to defeat giant armies or strong enemies. In particular, I found the Axe and Maul Giants to be far more powerful than any other unit I saw in the game. An army of them could beat any unit that wasn’t an aquatic type. I found this to be a little unbalanced.

In the game modes Full Conquest, Imperial Conflict, and Rougelite; you win by conquering all circles on the board. In Full Conquest and Rougelite, the enemies stay in their circles. Rougelite is the only game mode where resources don’t regenerate.

In Imperial Conflict, there are AI-controlled empires that will try to take over the board. Whenever you find a circle controlled by an AI empire, there will be a timer which will tell you how long it will be until the army on that circle will move to conquer an adjacent circle.

In the game modes Monster Hunt and Stop the Army, you don’t need to conquer all circles to win. These game modes revolve around defeating a boss unit (Monster Hunt) or a giant invading army (Stop the Army). Both game modes allow you to choose which boss or army you fight against, although to begin with, you only have one option for each mode. Like with the warlords, you unlock more options by winning matches in those modes.

While Monster Hunt was about as difficult as the first 3 game modes, I found Stop the Army to be particularly difficult. No matter how big I made my army, it seemed like I could never even make a dent in the invading army. Of course, the one time I did win that mode was when I made an army made exclusively of Axe and Maul Giants, hence why I call those 2 units overpowered. In this case though, I think they should make the invading armies easier to defeat.

There is also a 6^th mode called King Hunt, but that game mode can only be played in multiplayer. As I was unable to find someone to play with, I was unable to test out this mode.

Overall, I enjoyed my time with this game, although playing Stop the Army was frustrating. As such, I think a fair rating for it is 7.5/10.

Check Out the Circle Empires: Rivals Trailer:

Circle Empires Rivals will be releasing tomorrow, April 15th via Steam. 

Jason Freedman

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I am a recent Computer Science/Game Development Programming Chapman University Graduate. I am a life long enthusiast of computer/video gaming and my favorite game genres are adventure, choice-driven stories, fighting, and racing. My favorite game/movie series include but aren't limited to 'Legend of Zelda'; 'Dragon Age'; 'Persona'; 'Sonic the Hedgehog'; 'Mario'; 'Metroid' ;'Megaman'; 'Naruto'; 'Batman'; 'Spiderman'; 'Star Wars'; and 'Star Trek.'

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