Tynon

Tynon is an artfully designed browser game where players role play to build their kingdom, engage in the turn-based battles, deploy heroes in party formations, join social groups and ultimately wind up embarking on a journey to rescue the King and protect thirteen kingdom.

The game is developed by uCool, a China-based gaming startup founded by the former employees of Evony. The closed beta in July 4, 2012 and the open beta is live in July 25, 2012.

Overview:

Tynon employs a rich mix of genres such as RPG, Strategy, turn-based, City Builder, PVP and the like, along with  social options and single-player campaigns. All makes the game sound engaging and it is even enhanced by members of  the world’s most popular browser game Evony.

The game is more like Tamer Saga, but it is better in graphics rendering and plot narrative.

Video:

Review:

This is absolutely a strategy title.

Town hall, the primary building in the home city, upgrades with you while the other structures must be purchased in the shop and then built in the city. Those structures, excluding the residential and commercial houses, can be upgraded as you level up your city in the Ville. The level of your forge decides the maximum level of your weapons while the academy opens up various researches as it levels up. And you need to upgrade the academy and do researches to enhance your battle skills. There is a Strategy Mastery that helps determine how many heroes you could include in your formation, which is very important in the group turn-based battles.

A game without battles wouldn’t be a strategy one. In Tynon, you will explore maps – sorry, you are invisible in the game and instead you recruit heroes each time you defeat a major enemy. All the maps are filled with enemies and you can see a new opponent only after you defeat the previous one. More often than not, the enemies stand on the unnecessarily winding staircases all over the places. That is why the maps are so small that you can see them all in a glimpse.

Click an enemy and the Battle button, and you will enter the battle scene. In the turn-based battles, every action is automatic. You don’t even have to select the skill or attack because the skills those heroes possess are fixed from the moment you hire them. You can do nothing but to watch the combat. Fortunately, the battling graphics are nice, especially when the heroes unleash their special skills.

But it resembles Facebook social games.

The more I play this game, the more I feel like I am dealing with a Facebook social game. That is because in the home city, players not only construct and upgrade important structures for military purposes, but also collect taxes from residential and commercial houses. Those houses, offered at a rather low price, reward you with revenues at certain intervals. And that is usually what we often experience in social games on Facebook. The good news is you collect the revenues without spending any energy. As long as you have not reached the daily tax cap determined by your level, you are allowed to collect as many coins as you want.

Whenever you want a rest between battles or have to wait to harvest crops and collect revenues, you can visit friends’ cities and help gathering coins. In that way, you will gain some energy and small amounts of coins.

Its energy system sucks.

Tynon does deploy an energy system and the energy is spent on battles. Usually, you will consume one energy point each time you battle an enemy. If the energy systems in Facebook games are troublesome and annoying, the one in Tynon is painful. You obtain only one point per hour and can easily run out of energy at any time.

Which would you choose between long waits and money?

And the energy recovery is not the only thing that takes hours. Building upgrades take three or four hours at first and dozens later while the training of heroes takes 12 hours each. Since your heroes neither level up with you nor accumulate experience through battles and training is the only way you can ever upgrade heroes and increase their power, you are so not likely to have heroes that are strong enough to crush all the enemies involved in the tasks.

All those problems could be solved with money. Of course, in such games, money speeds up everything, but it also lessens the difficulty and fun. Without paying money, I stuck after reaching level 22. And if I am still reluctant to pay, the game will stay unplayable because the enemies are of much higher levels than my heroes.