A couple of years ago, it took me ages to find a free multiplayer game on the internet, but now the web is full of free games. There’s probably a market for it. Next to the flash games, MMO’s are probably the most popular free games on the web. Most of them are MMORPG’s. I was searching for a few MMO strategy games, but it’s quite hard to find a good one in this forest of MMO spam. After a lot of sites that required payment for most of the functions, I now found a semi-free javascript based MMO strategy game: Tinywarz, and most of it’s functions are free.

Tinywarz is a MMO turn based strategy game with some RPG elements in it. You can level up your units and your commander. Your commander can learn new commands as he proceeds trough the game. The whole RPG system and the army maintain system look a lot like the one used in the Fire Emblem series: you maintain your army out of battle in your base, and if you want to fight, you need to deploy your army.

The maintenance of your army is the most important thing in the game. You have to create new vehicles for your soldiers to drive in, and upgrade them with modifications. Also, you must configure an army which you can deploy on planets. The army consists of soldiers in vehicles and a base you can create.

building a mod

To make the vehicles and the base structures, you will need ore. This ore you can mine from the planets you can deploy to. This adds up to the gameplay because you can deploy to a planet for three things: training your army, mining ore to expand your army or to PVP. Depending on what you want, you can deploy to different sorts of planets, and play the game.

If you deploy your army, you will walk on the planet for a couple of turns. These turns are time based, so if you have a large army, you will need quite some time to move it to the right location, so you must be fast. This gives some problems with the controls, because you must command every unit separately, and this is time consuming. Also the battles you will fight are somewhat strange, because the enemy moves in the same turn, making it rather impossible to be on the same space on the map to attack in a good way. So it’s a game of clicking and hoping. Something I don’t like is that there aren’t any battle animations or something, making the game quite boring.

The base creator tool

Because every deployment takes half an hour or more, the game is very slow, and will take a lot of time. Nevertheless, if you are a strategy fan, and you like turn based strategy, you will probably like this game. You can really improve your army in the game, even if you don’t have the paid options. It also has a very active community, there are always enough players on-line to chat or to play against. If you’re an active player, you can even join into some factions (clans) which will give you some advantages like new units and some allies in the game.

Tinywarz is not the best game I’ve ever played, but it’s the best MMO strategy game I’ve found so far. The controls are not the best ones, and so are the graphics. There are enough unit types to put in your army, and the people who pay don’t have a very big advantage over the free accounts.

You should play this game if you: Like strategy, don’t mind the bad graphics, have enough time.
You should not play this game if you: Like great graphics, want a real time strategy game, want good controls.

You can check out more screenshot on http://www.tinywarz.com/screenshots.html

You can click here to register to this free game.

Score: 6

Pseudoquest is a brand new MMORPG. It’s so new that it’s still in the beta fase, so there’s still more content coming. I’ve played this game for a while, so here’s what I think about this game so far.

It’s a browser based MMORPG. This means that you don’t have to download install packages and such, you only have to sign up to the game, and you can play (it’s totally free). The bad side of a browserbased game is that the graphics suck. And yes, the graphics aren’t next-gen, it’s quite old-school… pixel art.

So the graphics aren’t really great, what about the gameplay?
Well, the gameplay is not bad, you only need a mouse to play. It’s 99% click based, so no hard controls, nothing, just clickin’. The 1%? is chatting… as far that’s possible… there aren’t many people on-line, and you can only chat with people in your region. There is no whisper function, or a general chat. Well, we are lucky the chat function isn’t needed very much: it’s a turn based MMO.

A turn based MMORPG isn’t something I’ve ever seen before, but it works for me. The basic principle is that you get a few turns every hour. You can use them to walk through the map or to pick up a side quest. This has some positive effects: the game is still fun after a week and you won’t become addicted, putting a lot of time in it that could be spent better. It also has some negative effects: you can’t become a higher level than your friends if they play each day, and there aren’t a lot of people on-line at the same moment, making it hard to call it a MMORPG, which makes the chat function pretty useless… but maybe this will change in the future.

So you get SNES graphics and the gameplay isn’t the best MMORPG gameplay there is, why should you play this game?
Because it’s a very original game. The game isn’t about the graphics, it’s about making fun of RPG’s. All the descriptions of the items and monsters, and the text of the quests are hilarious. The nonsense in RPG’s is reflected in these texts: why does it help to kill exact 10 slimes? Why are the weapons so standard in all the RPG’s? If you look at the game from this parody point of view, the graphics don’t really matter, they fit the purpose. If you think that the chat isn’t needed, the message board on the site is good enough.

So: if you have played a lot of RPG’s, you will probably understand the humor in this game, and you will probably like this game. You will even have a good time if you aren’t a hardcore RPG player, there are a lot of quests in this game, so you will have something to do.
If you’re looking for a real MMO, this isn’t the game you are looking for.

Score: 7/10

You can play this game and read more information about it on www.pseudoquest.com. Please use this (http://www.spymac.com/details/?2110843) link if you want to be my referral.

Score: 7