Inside Social Games

One doesn’t necessarily need a lot of resources or money (depending on the scale of course) to produce a decent game these days. Of course, there are many benefits to having a larger team – multiple disciplines allow for deeper specialization on a product, and generally allows for seeing things in ways that you may have never thought of.

A relatively new game by the name of Combat Zone falls into this category. The game was produced by a single person, Manuel Hanisch, and all things considered, isn’t bad (as far as core design goes). However, it does have a few issues (more on that later). The game is somewhat of a cross between your typical Facebook RPG and a strategy game in which the core objective is to build up your army and become stronger in order to take another player’s territories.

When a player begins the game, they are given a territory of two villages, two oil fields, and one camp. They then begin building up their base within the camp by “building” selected items or structures that take X amount of time to finish and give various attributes. As you play and level up, you gain more recruits which you train into soldiers (which are obviously used to attack and defend territories), and then have to move about a world map in order to gather various resources, such as your primary income of oil, in order to make purchases and strengthen yourself further. Moreover, you take your soldiers on missions in order to earn experience for yourself and extra stats for your army, thus training them to combat enemy players.

In addition to the obvious competitive factor of enemy player armies, there is also a social element of incorporating your friends in what is called “Your Company,” as key officers and members to your army. This in turn allows you to perform actions to earn “discipline points” and attempt harder missions. However, while this all sounds well and good, there is one key problem.

The new player experience for this game is, suffice to say, not so good. There is a lot going on at first, and minimal player feedback or direction at the start. Combat Zone starts you off with six different icons at the top of your screen, a map with multiple locations to go to, a company with another stat, missions that give different stats (i.e. Asshole +1?), recruits, and then if you move on the map, you get different missions from different locals. That is a lot to swallow, and the FAQ section of the game barely answers anything that is pertinent to a new player. Nowhere does it say what stats actually do (with the exception of player only stats, not your armies), where you should go, or what the best method to start is. Heck, you’re not even sure what the goal is for the game itself. Furthermore, since it is a strategy based game as well, your four adjacent territories can be occupied by enemy forces right at the start. How exactly is that fair to a new player? Essentially, they can’t do anything outside their camp until they can beat that person, which is a prime recipe for quitting.

Despite the trial and error learning curve (and applying what you have learned from games like Mob Wars), the game has the potential to actually be quite fun. However, it is far too user unfriendly for someone that has never seen the app before. To that end, it is difficult to say how good the game even is later on, because God knows what could be added and what new things need to be figured out, and being attacked or at risk while trying to learn is just flat out frustrating. There is a lot of work to be done in explaining the game (or at the very least making a full on help section on what everything means and does), but if somehow that could be revamped… well, actually done at all, the game play’s fun factor would jump exponentially.