Direct Link : Warring Nations
Publisher : Inscenic

Price : $14.95

Graphics : 9.5 Out of 10
Sound : 9 out of 10
Gameplay : 10 Out of 10
Longevity : 9.5 Out of 10
Overall : 9.5 Out of 10

Set in medieval times, Warring Nations gives you the opportunity to rule and expand your empire by any means necessary.

You begin the game by selecting who you wish to play as. You can choose to play as the Franks; Germans; Italians; Normans; Saxons; Slavs and Spanish. Each nationality gives you 3 rulers to choose from, except the Saxons where you are presented with 5. The range of historical characters you can play as include Robin Hood; Richard the Lion Heart; Joan of Arc and Pope Julius II. Choosing a character isn’t just a matter of choosing a name you like. No, each character has varying skill levels for each criteria, Combat, Spy, Diplomacy, Trade and Building to which each has a value of between 0 and 4, so choose carefully.

Once your character is selected, you choose to select to play on one of three maps of different sizes, populations and opposing players and can also select from 4 different levels of difficult, Trivial, Easy, Normal and Hard. There are also additional maps you can download from the website, giving an enormous boost to the playing longevity.

You then finally need to select whether you want the resources in the game map to be random or stay with the predefined settings and lastly how many players you want to play against, between 2 and 5.

So you’re all fired up and ready to go, now the real fun begins.

For anyone who’s played Risk (the game of world domination) before, the basic gameplay will be fairly familiar. The map is split into several pieces, these are provinces and the provinces are split into further smaller lands. Build up your forces and take over freeland to build your empire. When you feel you have sufficient forces, start to attack opposing sides by either plundering money or taking control of the land and adding it to your empire. All this happens in a turn based fashion, so you make various decisions, end your turn and one by one, the opposing players do the same.

The first thing that hits you is the superb graphics, that goes for both the standard 240×320 QVGA and the 480×640 VGA versions. During the gameplay there’s many things to tweak and play with, but this almost becomes second nature, due to the thought that has been put into the user interface.

This is such an amazing game, with so many facets, it’s almost impossible to go into any great depth. Suffice to say, if you like Risk or any kind of world domination or God game, you will definitely enjoy Warring Nations.

Conclusion : This is almost the perfect game. I say almost, but just can’t part with that elusive 10 out of 10. Every game has some room for improvement, but with Warring Nations, we’re talking minor tweaks, rather than radical changes. Surely an all time classic game for the Pocket PC.