Total rip-off. (cashwars)

Member Name: spiffo

Product:	cashwars
Date:	09/05/01 (67 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fun to begin with.

Disadvantages: Boring after about two days, you'll never get any money, people keep cheating with "bots".

It seemed like fun when I first signed up. You wander around the terrain, stumbling across other people's bases and attacking them for money. If you come across an oilfield, drill for oil, which you can swap for better drills (so you can... er... drill for more oil), better weapons or better defences for your own base, which you've left behind.

The whole game works as a huge grid. On each square, you press either the North, South, East or West buttons to move to another grid square which will contain either oilfields, mountains (where you can dig for prizes), someone else's base or emptiness. You each start with $5 in special "Akzar" cash. I think Akzar must mean "worthless" in some other language. You need to get $30 in Akzar cash before it's worth anything, which is close to impossible... but I'll come back to that later.

When you reach a base, you can either leave, click the "spy" button or click the "attack" button. If you choose to spy, you can find out how much cash is in the base and what its defences are like. When you attack, the computer looks at your attack level and the enemy's defence level, and decides which of you wins the fight. There's a huge random element in this to make sure that new players have a chance of joining in the game properly.

If you win, you get a bit of their cash, which transports itself to their base. If you lose, you drop a bit of your money (which... er... has just transported from your base to your pocket), and it becomes the property of the guy whose base you just attacked.

This sounds like great fun, and it is for the first few days. Then it just gets tedious. Once you've got the best drill and upgraded your weapons a couple of times, it takes (literally) hours of tediously going up to oil squares and pressing the drill button to get another upgrade.

Furthermore, once you've upgraded your weapons a few times
, you start to realise that your weapon strength has very little impact on whether or not you win your fights... it's almost random anyway.

There are some people who play this game a hell of a lot to try to make money, and there are also people who've set up "bots", programmes that will play the game for them while they're away from the computer. If you don't do either, you'll have no chance of making it up to the $30 you need to get any money.

The Akzar money is worth a third of real cash, and you need to get $10 in real cash before you can "cash-out" and get your money. Unfortunately, once you get above about $20, other players realise how rich you are and keep attacking you again and again (since they get a percentage of what you've got when they win, it's worthwhile running the risk of losing some money). If they are human, they'll also tell their friends and, worst of all, if they're bots, they'll tell other bots.

I assume it's possible to reach $30 in Akzar eventually, but it would take a lot of time and effort, it would become very boring, and it would result in you getting about £6 in real cash.

I think it would be easier to write a few reviews for DooYoo...

Summary: