Imperi II Reviews

unplayable

great games for spending time in this lockdown situation

Imperi 2 is a Java based browser app that seems to have been dumped on Steam as a paid product (unclear why... unethical behaviour? Or a dev who generally thinks Steam is for Java browser apps?). It's a direct copy + paste of Imperi 1, except the developer cleverly reskinned it in the hopes people wouldn't notice he's dumped the same garbage Java browser app onto Steam twice. Well, we noticed, and it's still garbage. Anyway, since the entire game is a copy + paste (asset flipping begins at home!), I don't think anyone will complain if my review is also copy + pasted from Imperi 1. The defects are the same. This is a really bad text based number/RNG survival game where you run a kingdom and allocate your resources on planting food, hiring soldiers etc, then hitting the end turn button to see what RNG events drain your resources. These games have been around for a while, so I can't really say this is just a lame ripoff of Dead in Bermuda, rather, Dead in Bermuda is another me-too in that old, dead gaming genre. But if it helps you to think of this as a bad ripoff of Dead in Bermuda, it will help to understand why nobody should buy this Java based "I can't believe this isn't a browser game" trashware. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. The artwork here, what little of it there is, is terrible, it's a hodge-podge of amateurish "My First Wacom Tablet" style drawings used instead professional looking game assets. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget to arrange someone who can create graphical assets properly, or lack of talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low, enough on its own to deter gamers. The game interface is mostly just text boxes/dialogs and features mostly static, barely animated 2D images, the kind of thing you expect to see in browser/HTML games from the 1990s. While that might be fine for the 1990s, gaming has evolved a lot since then, the ATI Rage became mainstream in 1996... it's 2023, and that kind of thing just won't fly anymore, it's just not visually up to scratch. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. Bewilderingly, the game doesn't include proper audio controls, so you can't turn off the annoying background music, you'll need to alt+tab out and stop the music using the Windows sound mixer. This is obviously not okay and it's unclear why the developers chose not to include this basic feature. The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here. Comically, the game was written in Java (I'm not making this up). Talk about not using the right tools for the job. Might as well try to bake a cake with a screwdriver. The extremely poor choice of game engine here is a major contributing factor to the defects with the game. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. Imperi II didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for clicking long enough to get 500 clerics, trivial to get, but less than 25 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the game. The poor quality of this game is also reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the game all-time peak player count was only ONE player. That's right, only one person ever played this at a time. When I played this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak player count for the game. OUCH. The only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. Imperi 2 is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.

MUCH harder than the original. It's harder to get started, but at least there's a clear end goal this time, take over your enemies land before they take yours!