Ubuntu Games: The Battle for Wesnoth.

    The Battle for Wesnoth is a turn based stratagy game set in your typical fantasy world.  Wesnoth is a ton of fun, as long as you can look past it's outdated graphics which granted most free open source games have.  It has a great style about it in my opinion and is fairly addictive.  This game is easy to get the hang of and could compete with many commercial stratagy games of the same style.

Campaign


    The campaign I have played so far has a fun classic fantasy story about a royal destined for the throne with an elderly wizard as a constant companion.  The two get into all kinds of hairy situations as they do battle against a wicked queen as she attempts to expand her evil empire.  The Battle for Wesnoth may seem at times to be telling the same old fantasy story you have heard over and over again.  However, it does it in my opinion in a way that is original and fresh.


Game play


    The game play reminds me a lot of civilization's combat.  Wesnoth has some RPG-like elements.  Your units (or characters if you will) level and you can choose different character classes as they advance.


    While your objectives vary from scenario to scenario, essentially your goal it to capture more cities, more gold and outmanoeuvre your opponent.  Often this involves either surviving a certain number of turns or killing your enemy's leader character or wiping out their army completely.


Immersion


    Wesnoth is very much your typical fantasy world, filled with all those wierd names you're not quite sure if you are pronouncing correctly.  It is full of maps, kingdoms, factions, races, characters and everything else you love about a completely made up fantasy world.


    While the world (from my perspective) is lacking lore, there is a whole community behind Wesnoth that is always creating more campaigns and history for the game and the world that it inhabits. Wesnoth doesn't take itself very seriously. It almost seems to poke fun at itself sometimes, which I personally like. However if you are looking for an immersive fantasy experience this is probably not what you are looking for.




How to get it?


    One of the great things about The Battle for Wesnoth is that you can get it on all major desktop platforms, but my focus of course is on how to get it for Ubuntu.  This is remarkably easy.  Wesnoth is available from the Ubuntu Software Center or from running the following in a terminal:

sudo apt-get wesnoth-1.8

Rating

    This game is great. The gameplay is a lot of fun and is fairly addictive. The campaigns have interesting enough stories to keep you into the game.  The world as a whole however could use some more development. I am giving The Battle for Wesnoth 4 group hugs out of 5, an awesome game with a lot of potential for further development.