Your job in the single-player campaign is to rebuild your forces and take a total of 15 islands.
Scarlett, pictured right, shows you how to you rebuild your island paradise after the evil tyrant Raven attacks it and leaves it in ruins. Unlike most of Zynga’s other games, this title has a storyline and more than 30 characters who help make the experience more engaging. “It blends hardcore game mechanics with CityVille-like mechanics of building and maintaining your empire,” Ajami said. Most Zynga games are played for 10 minutes at a time, and Empires & Allies is no different. The game isn’t a huge time sink like many combat games, since you don’t have to micro-manage your resources and combat units. That may be what drew Zynga to expand into this part of the market.Ījami said his team, which is made up of a number of PC game veterans, built the game as a fun combat strategy game, but also tailored it for Zynga’s broad market of mass market casual players on Facebook. But Kabam, which raised $85 million last week, has discovered that those hardcore gamers are willing to spend a lot of money in each game. Hardcore gamers on Facebook are a relatively untapped market, served only by a few game companies such as Kabam. “The game translates what makes traditional games fun into the Zynga style,” said Amer Ajami, executive producer of the game at the Zynga Los Angeles studio. (EA has launched its Superstars series of sports games on Facebook, while Ubisoft has created games for Assassin’s Creed and CSI: Crime City). With this game, Zynga is pushing into the domain of hardcore game publishers such as Electronic Arts and Activision Blizzard, who have only begun to deploy hardcore game properties on Facebook.