CrowdStar launches post-apocalyptic hardcore strategy game Wasteland Empires

By Jeff Hughes October 21, 2011

Fallout fiends and Starcraft brood may enjoy the latest offering from CrowdStar. The company launched Wasteland Empires today, a Facebook game shifting CrowdStar’s focus from its list of happy and pink themed social games towards a hardcore strategy gamer demographic.

In this Facebook real-time strategy game, players lead a band of scraggly nomads who’ve settled around a pure source of water. The setting is post-apocalyptic, a world we’re familiar with from games like Fallout 3 or Rage. In CrowdStar’s RTS, you’ll grow your town and your renown by scavenging scraps, opening up more land, researching new technology, creating better and stronger troops and fending off ravenous raiders.

Currently, Wasteland Empires is available as a beta test. Gameplay-wise, you may get flashbacks from classic strategy games like Warcraft or Starcraft which the post-apocalyptic game has been designed to emulate. There are development trees that require combinations of research to build different troops or buildings. When attacking, players click on buildings and deployed troops scurry across the screen to do your bidding.

Socially, the game allows resource gifts to be given among friends. Wasteland Empires also uses a gold currency used to speed up build times which you can either buy, or just earn through leveling up.

In the past, CrowdStar has targeted a mainly female audience, with casual games like It Girl, and Happy Aquarium. This latest move aims at a demographic of young male gamers who play for longer periods of time than other social gamers, though the company may have a hard time with user acquisition given that its current user base. However, the game offers unique elements, graphics and somewhat of a storyline that may differentiate it from games by competitors like Kabam and Kixeye.

“We believe role-playing and strategy games offer a big opportunity in social gaming compared to casual games, which other developers are focusing on,” said CrowdStar CEO Peter Relan. “With our games, It Girl and Top Girl, we went into role-playing games. Wasteland is the next step in the direction of strategy based social games.”

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I'm a SF Bay Area-based writer/ninja that loves anything geek, tech, comic, social media or gaming-related.

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