A nice touch is that the style of all the buildings in your own city changes to match the Guest Race. It’s a significant shake up to the game and finding space for the sudden influx of new buildings is a real challenge. Guest Races invade your city through a portal and force you to build independent subcities producing their own special resources in order to progress. Nevertheless, the game was wearing thin after a couple of months and I was about to move on when I unlocked the first Guest Race section of the game. It’s all very cheerful and unthreatening and, simply put, fun. You can visit them to polish their buildings and form little Fellowships to take on the weekly events. Of course you have thousands of neighbours building their own cities. So many of these games resort to tiny, pixellated graphics but Elvenar is refreshingly different. Then you unlock an upgrade and need to redesign your entire city when a key building changes its shape and size! A stand-out feature is how chunky the buildings are. The game is like Tetris played out over the course of weeks and months as you gradually perfect the placement of your differently shaped buildings. Throwing £20 or £30 at the game wouldn’t get you very far. Fortunately, these are not vital because they are extortionately expensive. Of course, extra space or slightly more productive buildings can be purchased using in-game currency. This is fitting since InnoGames’ Tribal Wars was my first MMO back in the early noughties.Įlvenar is a city-building game where the strategy comes from carefully arranging your buildings to squeeze the most resources out of a limited space. At the moment, that game is Elvenar by InnoGames. Once in a while, though, a game is interesting enough to capture my attention for a year or more. The sheer quantity of artwork some of these games contain is astounding, with thousands of weapons and individual pieces of armour available to buff your chosen warrior. All in the hope that the incoherent story might, one day, come to an end. They feature inconsequential, badly translated plots and throw in random mini-games to keep you occupied as you wait for your stamina to recover so you can click through another encounter. Many of these MMOs are completely interchangeable. Games that are free to play, but offer endless opportunities to buy in-game currency to speed things along or get a fancy orange shield. You know, those games advertised by clickbait, starring Kate Upton’s cleavage. Every once in a while I try a new free-to-play, massively multiplayer online Flash game.