Dominator is a Facebook strategy game developed by Crazy Panda, a Russia-based social and mobile game maker behind The Household and Wonderland. In this game, players claim the oil, the premium but insufficient resource in the post-apocalyptic world, raise their own troops, manufacture their own ammunition and vehicles, and seek for ultimate domination over the whole planet.
Review:
An amazingly brief battle tutorial is provided the moment you log in to this game. All you need to know is that the turn-based battles are not automatic and you need to click one of your units to attack an enemy unit every time when it is your turn. After defeating your first enemy, you are free to follow the quests and do everything on your own.
But that wouldn’t pose any problem, because Dominator allows for the most intuitive and fluent controls you would ever see in strategy games. You can mouse over the quest button to check what to do next, or hover over a structure and click the corresponding button to upgrade, rotate or relocate the structure.
The highly accessible base management makes experienced gamers feel at ease, but the battles do the opposite. As is said before, the game requires players to decide on every move their troops make during battles. However, clever strategies are designed long before the battles start.
Different units possess varying health, land attacks on enemies in different positions, and of course also have their own limitations. For example, rangers have the least health among all the units but can shoot enemies from afar as long as there are no units between them and their enemies. The differentiation between those units necessitates a proper deployment of multiple units and a steady supply of those units.
Interestingly and annoyingly, oil is the prominent resource not only in the story but also in your own gaming experience. You will need plenty of it to upgrade this or that building, train enough soldiers, and even purchase more structures from the store. It is complicated when a game relies mainly on one resource only – it both saves you the trouble of building different structures for producing other resources and at the same time leaves your only hope of making progress on how much oil you own and how fast you can produce presently.
I run out of oil shortly after reaching level 2, and with the only available quest demanding 6000 units of oil but with only scores of units in my depot, I have nothing to do but keep attacking enemies in the battle maps. However, I was unable to continue before long, since the enemies get increasingly powerful. Therefore, I was forced to go back to the base and train more units before returning to battles.
With intuitive controls and deep strategy contents perfectly presented, Dominator proves to be a promising title.
MMORPG, MMO, Online Games for free
