Game Reviews

Tiny Token Empires

Star onStar onStar onStar onStar off
|
| Tiny Token Empires
Get
Tiny Token Empires
|
| Tiny Token Empires

Developers are having to find ever more ingenious clothes in which to dress their match-three puzzlers. It's not good enough to just shove a Bejeweled clone out into the app store and hope for the best.

Take Tiny Token Empires. At first glance, it looks like it might be a cutesy historical RTS. Maybe a tower defence game with a cheeky sense of humour. But it's not.

Sure, there's some strategy happening, but the meat of the game is a deceptively simple colour-matching showdown.

Thankfully, there's a lot to like about Tiny Token Empires, even if it does skirt dangerously close to being just another chip off the puzzling block.

Puzzling conquest

The cut and thrust behind your puzzling is conquest. You play a general from one of five major time periods, leading your armies on a rampage around the world and trying to take over as many places as you can.

Your conquest is split into missions, and the game is turn-based. You move your army around a stylised world map, positioning men in territories and using the income you make from each of these to strengthen your ranks.

Once you place some of your troops on an inhabited portion of the map, it's time to go to war. You tap on an icon to be taken to the battle grid, a 9 x 9 square of coloured circles that'll be instantly familiar to anyone who's picked up a phone in the past three years.

Match three or die

Each of the battles is different depending on the troops you have in play. Your troop types correspond to different coloured tokens on the board, and making those tokens disappear grants extra power to your troops. Once they've gained enough power, they can make an attack on the opposing faction. Perform enough of these and you'll kill your opponent.

All the while, your opponent is doing the same, gaining his own power in order to make a strike at you. It's a really interesting mechanic, and it means that your world domination is far more hands-on than in other strategy titles.

Once you've defeated whichever tribe you were battling, you take over its land and income, and amalgamate it into your ever-growing empire. You can build settlements, hire more men, and generally get all dictatorial in your drive for power.

Special relationship

By rights, Tiny Token Empires shouldn't work. It's taken two spectacularly disparate game forms and squashed them together, but it's done it with such charm and attention to detail that it's managed to pull it off.

The match-three puzzling is given extra impetus by its new-found martial nature, and the empire-building is enjoyable enough that getting bogged down in numbers and statistics isn't really an option.

Tiny Token Empires is fun, fresh, and silly in just the right way. Whilst hardcore RTS fans will balk at its simplicity, and some puzzle addicts will be put off by its depth, everyone else will find a wealth of entertainment.

Tiny Token Empires

A stealthily concealed puzzle game, Tiny Token Empires is a hybrid of the best sort, mixing together two styles of play to create something really intriguing
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.