GeoEmpires iPhone Game Review
Price: FREE Score: 8/10 Category: Games
GeoEmpires (official website here) is a location-based iPhone game that lets you conquer real-world territories.
After opening the app, you have three options for signing in: Facebook, Google, or your GeoEmpires account.
Wrapping your head around what you see might take a little time. The whole neighborhood is laid out in a series of grids overlaid on a Google map. Your lands will be displayed in a white overlay. The castle icon indicates level of land defense; the crown the lord loyalty on the land; and the archer symbol shows your loyalty on enemy lands.
By walking on other territories, you lose money to tolls, but you can raise loyalty (which in turn helps you conquer lands or get gold.) If your loyalty is high enough, you can start taking over lands that don’t belong to you. As you walk around, you encounter treasures on the map. Walk over them, and you get bonus gold.
There’s a chat feature built in, so you can coordinate attacks with other players, which is pretty cool, and makes GeoEmpires a lot more compelling. However, because of the use of GPS, you’re gonna run down your battery much faster than normal.
Typos do a lot to unnerve and amuse users (just ask Mitt “Amercia” Romney), so it’s worth noting there are tons of typos in GeoEmpires. Another thing that might annoy users is the frequency with which the app crashes.
It only crashed once during testing for us, but other user reviews have stated that the crashing can be somewhat obnoxious. To be fair, however, the latest version did address some of the stability issues, so the developers are responsive to the issue.
If you’re obsessed with location-based iPhone games, or are a hardcore gamer looking to lose weight by walking more, GeoEmpires absolutely incentivizes your empire-building experience. But be prepared: depending on where you live, you might have to put in some serious hours to conquer the competition.
GeoEmpires is compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iOS 4.3 or later.