I know The Guildmasters is pretty much surrounded by PS3 talk and games but occasionally something different springs up and I check it out.

My latest exploration found me investigating something i’d seen advertised on my frequent visits to gamefly, an online game called Evony.

I couldn’t be sure if it was any good just by reading some reviews so decided to pay Evony a visit, to my surprise it was more popular than I expected it to be, somewhere in the region of 10 million players give or take a few thousand either way, probably more now as I witnessed “newbies” arriving daily while I was there.

Anyway I signed up for a free account and yes actually it is free and always will be, that’s their guarantee as well as their slogan ‘free forever”, although you can deposit real money if you wish to advance quicker but I don’t really see the point unless your impatient, then this game probably isn’t for you anyway.

Ok so I know your all asking why on earth have I got involved in something completely away from my usual stuff, there is a good reason.

I played a game on my PS3 called civilization and obviously expected too much from it, my own personal view on that game was that it was rubbish, I played it for one day completed it once and sent it back the next day.

Evony is what I expected from civilization, it’s a brilliant game of strategy, alliance, independance (if that’s what you want), and creation.

You literally build a city, your city, from the ground up, you start with a plain piece of ground and start building, cottages for your people to live in and so your population can grow, upgrade the cottages to house more people, build barrracks to train your army, or concentrate on defenses only, you can build and upgrades walls around your city with archer’s towers.

Outside your city is your resource fields where you can build farms to feed your growing population, build quarries to acquire stone for building, build ironmines and sawmills for the timber. Each building requires a certain amount of timber, iron and stone so you have to manage everything so that it is well balanced.

If you don’t generate enough food your people will leave you, your actions determine how high your prestige gets, and how loyal your people are.

You can demand a “levy” if your short on a particular resource but if you use that option too much your people’s loyalty will drop and they will show grievance towards you, if you don’t correct this, again they will leave.

There is an unbelievable amount of things to do in Evony and it’s a wonderful adventure. I’ve been with them for around two weeks now and i’m addicted.

You have a world chat so you can talk to fellow Evonians or if you join an alliance you can chat in alliance chat so you can discuss strategies, an alliance is good for protection against other cities who may want to attack you for your resources.

To start out you get 7 full days of peacetime in which no-one can attack your city, this gives you time to build your city and make it secure and to start creating defensive or protective measures such as archers, archers towers, traps, foot soldiers or cavalry.

Also there are quests which you should follow to begin with as completion of the quests actually reward you with items that you can use to speed things up or apply to other quests.

This is not a hugely time consuming game either, i’m really hooked on Evony but I don’t have to spend more than an hour a day playing it, you can play all day if you like or just 15 minutes here and there.

As your city reaches higher levels the upgrades can take many hours so at the moment I usually log into my account, upgrade a couple of things, have a chat with my alliance, then upgrade one of my higher level buildings which may take up to 30hrs real time, then I can go and do other things.

Sometimes I leave Evony running in the browser while playing the PS3 so I can keep an eye on upgrades and even my alliance friends will keep an eye on my city when i’m offline, it’s really cool.

In all honesty i’ve never felt like playing anything online, but this game is really unique, you get a great sense of accomplishment out of completing quests and a great sense of achievement when you conquer your first city.

There isn’t much sense in reading this review without giving it a go, it really is absolutely free and i’m not trying to sell the game to you, I found it, I loved it, and now i’m posting it on my blog as it is a game that in my book deserves a mention.

Evony has been getting a bit of a bad rep recently due to a number of people heavily spamming in forums and so forth, if you’ve been seeing Evony ads in your face everywhere then it is a minority of idiots that are abusing the system, please don’t let that put you off trying this one out.

You all know by my reviews i’m an rpg fanatic and adventure games make the cut sometimes, although this is probably not a full on RPG it has elements of RPG, Adventure, Strategy as well as a certain amount of skill and organization.

If you do join and give it a go, you can look out for me, my username is masteroftheguild and i’ve even named my city morrowind, i’m on server 126
To visit Evony just go to www.evony.com

If you have any questions about Evony I can help you with you can email me at masteroftheguild@yahoo.com

Tony