Uprising Empires

Uprising Empires is an intricate browser based strategy game developed by Targa that allows you to build cities, raise armies, conquer and expand your territory while advancing through different ages in a cool medieval atmosphere.  As in other building strategy games, you start in a small undeveloped city and your goal is to improve and raise it into a dominant power in your region. However, in Uprising Empires there is a concept of ages, each will unlock new features such as buildings and units, similar to famous games like civilization, where you move in time once you reach a certain point and are granted access to new and stronger technologies. Uprising Empires still stays in it’s medieval setting though, so there are no huge changes in power like if you would have moved from stone to iron age which means everything transforms and you might get stuck with low tier units, but in Uprising Empires the units don’t change, you just get access to new ones as you advance in ages.

Uprising Empires’ interface is pretty well designed and easy to use. You have access to several areas: The city map, where you can build the main buildings of your city; Resources field, where you can build up to four buildings of each of the four resources you can gather; Middle map which represent the area where your city is located and the world map which shows the entire world. There aren’t many buildings to build in Uprising Empires, except for the resources buildings each building can only be built once and will allow you to perform actions according to the building. Buildings can also be upgraded for extra bonuses and to unlock certain abilities, however the upgrade level is limited according to the age you are in. The same principal applies to research and technologies which are capped until you advance to the next age. Regarding resources gathering, it works rather slow than other games. Each upgrade gives just a small bonus to the overall production, so it might takes some time to raise the production high enough to support your upgrading and training needs. I found myself waiting for hours in order to collect enough resources to get the higher level upgrades. The limit of two upgrades at a time makes upgrading your resources field a bit tedious as there are 16 buildings you need to upgrade and the time for each increases drastically for the higher upgrades.

Except for the four resources you collect normally, you collect gold once per day from your town hall, the amount of gold you can collect increases with the city population and is used mainly for research. This is an important resource as research isn’t cheap and collecting gold requires logging every day to collect and building more cities and population.

Advancing through the ages takes time as well, each age has it’s own requirements such as army size and population. While recruiting army units is easy and only requires resources, in order to increase your population you need to upgrade buildings and build more cities in which you can build more buildings and upgrade them. Even though the population, gold and global research are shared between cities, other resources are bound to each city, so whenever you build a new city you need to build it’s entire foundations and wait for your resources to pile up in order to keep upgrading and researching. All this makes Uprising Empires a very slow strategy game that requires a lot of attention as you build new cities from the ground, on the other hand, there is much to do once you get started and raising your cities has a great sense of accomplishment. Combat in Uprising Empires is pretty simple, you recruit heroes from the tavern and different types of soldiers from the barracks and archery range, form armies and send them to attack the many targets that are available in the middle map, either for resources or items, or to invade another player’s city, simply form an army with the right units and send them to battle. There are different heroes with different talents that will affect your units and will grant bonuses according to their station. Using a hero in combat will also grant him experience which raise his level and allow you to allocate stat points to increase his power and effectiveness. If you’re lucky, you might find items to equip your heroes for some extra bonuses. Uprising Empires also features a quest system with city and daily quests which rewards you with some extra resources. There is an auction center, a forge where you can create items if you’re lucky, and of course, you can form an alliance with other players in order to conquer the world. Uprising Empires is a good browser based strategy game with great and appealing graphics, it has a slow pace but once you get your cities rolling there are plenty of things to do. There is a nice variety of units to train and many different aspects to navigate through in order to raise your influence and become a powerful player. The different ages add a unique spin on a well known game-play, making it one of the more appealing games of the genre which provides endless hours of entertainment.