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Revival is a turn based strategy game similar to games like Age of Empires or Civilization. Compared to most other games you play on the Treo this is a very in-depth game that can take several hours for just a short game.

The game is really well designed, and honestly feels more like an old-school PC game than your standard Treo game. You get treated to a nice bold splash screen, an animated introduction, and pages of scrolling storyline provided before and during each game.

When you start the game you have just one character (a mentor) that you must use to establish/capture your first town.

Your mentor is key to the game: if he dies in battle, your game is over - so keep him well protected! Likewise, if you can locate and kill an enemy’s mentor you will defeat their whole force.

Your first task is to find an unprotected village to capture. This can be a little difficult, as the map is obscured and you’re just as likely to bump into an enemy patrol as you are to find a village.

Just moving onto an unprotected village will capture it allowing you to start playing the game for real.

You’ll now have access to the town management part of the game. Each town consists of a central building surrounded by up to 8 buildings in the adjacent spaces. The positioning of the central building is very important as each of the surrounding squares will have different resources (food, money, and ore), all of which are important to your advancement. If you establish a village in a barren area you’ll get very little return on any investment. The resources in a square will only be collected if you build the appropriate building on a square. For example, you can build a farm to increase the food collected, or a market to increase the money you receive. As time progresses you can research upgrades, these will allow you to massively increase the income of resources from any square.

Most aspects of the town management side of the game work well but there are some aspects I’d like changed. I dislike that you can only build or upgrade one structure at a time in a town. This really limits the speed at which you can progress and you’ll find that there are times when you’re overflowing with resources but unable to progress as the structures you are building are taking so long to construct.

As each town is limited to a maximum of 9 squares you’ll quickly find yourself establishing multiple towns.

As your research reveals new upgrades, you can start to modernize your towns from medieval times, to the present, and then on to the future.

It’s not only your towns that improve with research. You start with the ability to train spear throwers and archers, and quickly move through to knights and swordsmen, modern day soldiers and artillery, before finally being able to produce giant robots and other futuristic units.

There are also some issues with the use of military units. I disliked that you couldn’t group units to form an army - each turn each unit has to be moved individually. I would also prefer it if you could set up queues of units to be manufactured rather than having to keep checking each town to see whether or not they were still producing a unit.

The way you control the game betrays the fact that the game has been ported to the Treo. Moving via the 5-way nav is difficult as it only works in 4 directions and you really need to be able to move in all 8 directions, so you have to use the number pad to navigate.

Revival is a hugely enjoyable game that offers depth rarely seen in games on the Treo. There are some flaws to the game but once you get used to them they aren’t that obtrusive and don’t stop the enjoyment of the game. Herocraft suggest the game takes 40 hours to complete and I don’t doubt this. You can easily spend 3-4 hours on a single game and the campaign mode just seems to go on and on. If you enjoy games like civilization, then Revival is well worth trying.

Related Links

Revival for Palm OS

Revival for Windows Mobile

Discuss Revival on the Games for Palm OS board

Discuss Revival on the Games for Windows Mobile board

Filed under: Software reviews