About the game
Snail Games is a US subsidiary of the Chinese company Suzhou Snail Electronics Company (I kid you not. That's the name of the company.). While Snail Games is based in the US, their games are developed in China. Their Chinese roots sometimes show through in MoW – more on that, later.

The game plays entirely in your browser, whether it's Firefox or Internet Explorer. It's a resource strategy game: Recruit some heroes, build housing and barracks, draft some troops, and set off to conquer the world. Best of all, it is free-to-play (F2P) – it doesn't cost a thing to sign up and take it for a drive.

Choosing a side
You choose from 4 different civilizations: Rome, Egypt, Persia, or China. Each civilization has different characteristics, though, most of the differences are primarily cosmetic. It's not like StarCraft where each faction has very distinct abilities or Heroes of Might and Magic where one faction is better at magic and the other has better troops. Each civilization does have slightly different troops, but overall the civilizations are all pretty much the same.

The tutorial

There's a lot to learn in MoW, particularly if you've never played a resource strategy game, before. Fortunately, the tutorial is very good, better than many tutorials in pay-to-play games. The tutorial covers the basics – recruiting troops, building your city, engaging in combat – and it takes you through it one step at a time.

As you progress and more game options become available to you, the tutorial steps in, again, to familiarize you with these additional gameplay options. You usually pick up these tutorial missions in your meeting hall. They're typically simple tasks that familiarize you with aspect of the game you haven't encountered before.

For instance, you progress technologically in the game by advancing your civilization from it infancy in the Wilds through the Dark Ages all the way to an Empire. You are given tasks to accomplish, such as building a Holy Place, that will progress your civilization through each of the necessary stages. As long as you build accordingly, you'll keep advancing.

The tutorial does a very good job of walking you through the basics of the the game without being tedious.

With building your cities, sending out your missionaries and merchants, and fighting monsters and other players there's a lot going on. It might seem a little overwhelming, but if you've ever played a resource strategy game, before, all of the mechanics will be familiar.

You start the game with one hero and are given some simple tasks to level that hero. The tasks are not particularly original, things like killing mobs and participate in an arena, match, but they do focus on advancing your hero. You can recruit additional heroes at your city's tavern (Shades of Might and Magic.).

There are 3 zones of activity – your city, the suburbs around your city, and the world. You build in your city and recruit additional heroes and troops there, as well as research new technologies. Your sources of materials – your mines, quarries, forests, and farms – are located outside the city in the suburbs. The suburbs are also a place to go adventuring, kill mobs, and level up your heroes.

Out in the world is where things get interesting and complicated. Here you can venture into lairs and find new treasures for your heroes. You can send out missionaries and merchants to other cities, expanding your influence and economic reach. And, of course, you can send out your heroes to attack other players and plunder their cities.

The ultimate goal of MoW is to rule the world. You do this through expanding your influence, creating alliances, and eliminating the other player. The game boosts “a unique feature in the world of browser MMOs: an Endgame... If one of [the MoW civilizations] rises up, through alliances and victories over rival empires, and defeats the other three, the winning civilization will be declared Champion of MoW and the Realm will reset, with spoils to the victors.”

If you're a fan of resource strategy games, the prospect of winning it all against players all those online players probably has you pretty excited.

Combat
If you've played other browser-based MMOs, you probably don't expect much from combat. MoW's combat is leaps and bounds beyond what other browser-based MMOs do. Still, it's not quite up to the standards of a single-player RTS, but it's still very satisfying.

Combat can be resolved in two ways: automatically or manually (The Confirm in the game.). Select automatic and the combat is resolved by the computer; you don't have to worry about it and you can go off and do other things. You can have a lot of things going on in MoW, so you'll want to resolve most of your battles automatically.

Manual combat does let you get down on the field level with your troops. You can manage where they go, when to pop potions, and what skills to use. The manual combat is pretty good, actually. The animations are nice for a browser game and you do have a good level of personal control over your troops. This is probably the best option when fighting other players.

Just use the automatic option, though, when fighting the mobs. It's usually not worth your time to take personal control of the action: Mobs in the game are disappointingly weak. Your heroes can handily kill mobs many times above their level.

It's clearly a Chinese port
MoW is fairly bug free. Most of the controls and features are intuitive and don't take long to figure out. Most. The biggest problem with the game is the translation from the Chinese to English doesn't make a lot of sense in many cases.

Many tasks have misspellings or the wrong choice of words. Some controls are confusing due to the translation issues. For instance, the option to resolve combat manually is the Confirm button. Confirm? And getting into a lair can take a while to figure out, too. You have to create your own lair instance and then you have to select the Check button not the Join button as you might expect.

Fortunately there's no Chinese. At least an effort was made to translate all the game to English. Overall, though, it's a poor effort. The translation problems can lead to confusion, and, sometimes, a little frustration.

Conclusion

Pros: It plays in a browser for optimal wasted work productivity. Easy to play. Lots of things to keep the fussbudget in you busy – missionaries, merchants, heroes, and armies. The promise of world domination.

Cons: Differences between the factions are primarily cosmetic. Mobs are too weak, so they don't present a real challenge. Missions aren't very inventive. The translations are sometimes amusing, but often confusing, too.

Final thoughts:  Ministry of War is a good resource strategy game, particularly good given that it's browser-based. It's not very challenging unless you're playing against someone else, though, and that's where the game will probably shine. The promise of the endgame and world domination will be the appeal of the game.

MoW isn't a fast game – it's not going to be over in a week or possibly even a month. It's going to take time, lots of time, to expand your empire and build alliances. But in the end, if you conquer the world, it's going to feel pretty sweet. Recommended for resource strategy nerds everywhere.

*Does anyone remember or care that the strategy games Supreme Commander, Warhammer 40K Dawn of War II Chaos Rising, Disciples III, or Elemental War of Magic all came out this year?

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