To be up front, I fully intended on doing a full review of How Empires Work. The game’s demo was so buggy and unpolished that my save softlocked me, but I assumed the full game wouldn’t be as problematic. I was sadly mistaken, as this game is loaded with glaring design issues, bugs, and various other problems that decidedly make it not worth it by most stretches of the imagination.
The game’s premise is quite clever; you’re to set up the British Empire by way of an incremental game. At the very start, there’s just a single town in a void, and you click to collect its taxes. Then you can click to recruit soldiers from the town, and then subsequently use the taxes and bodies to increase your tax rate. Upon progressing, you realise that you’re one town on an entire map of England.
At this point, you can either gain influence in other towns by sending them soldiers, or you can conquer them with regiments. The goal is to take over every town, collect taxes, and recruit soldiers to get your numbers higher and higher to purchase more and more upgrades. Before long, you can expand to Ireland, North America, and Africa. It’s not at all historically accurate, really, but I very much like the idea here.
Unfortunately, it completely falls apart in the details. For the most part, you’re going to be doing the exact same things endlessly. In most incremental titles, gameplay speeds up massively. How Empires Work likes to keep things at a similar speed. You’ll automate a lot of aspects, but when it comes to actually setting things up, you’ll mostly be doing it all manually. It gets incredibly old to a ridiculous degree.
Once you start colonizing other continents, things naturally get worse. You have to set up a sea lane and then send a colonization team to the new land. The game does not teach you how to do this. Beyond the bare essentials at the start, the game doesn’t really teach you how to do anything. This becomes a much larger problem as systems start piling up after you unlock them in the enormous advancements tree.
You’ll get to build new buildings, upgrade existing ones, unlock new institutions, and all sorts of other improvements. However, the game doesn’t tell you how to do most of this, and I couldn’t figure much of it out for the life of me. There’s an institutions tab that I assumed would fill up with new institutions as I unlocked them, but I never got more. I unlocked new building types, but couldn’t actually build anything new in my areas. I’m not sure if this is a bug or not, either, but if it is, next to nothing here actually works.
Sadly, that’s not all. Many, many items have placeholder text, too, which makes the game look unfinished. The UI is also kind of terrible, as UI elements end up interfering with each other, making it hard to click on all sorts of parts or even see what things say. The worst, though, is that my progress was stopped dead after a time. In North America, there was a conflict that needed resolving for me to keep going, but the conflict never actually showed up. Colonizing an area in Canada also became so slow that I couldn’t really do it.
Apparently, you can improve your colonization values, but, just like with everything else in How Empires Work, I have no idea how to do this. It all feels like a beta build, and it got updated twice on the day I wrote this, fixing just a single one of the game’s issues and leaving most of everything I’ve mentioned above. This is easily one of the most unfinished retail titles I’ve ever seen, and I’ve reviewed literally hundreds of games. I do love the idea, and maybe it’ll be worth a look if it gets patched to be even semi-functional. For now, though? Stay away.
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