by Ebey Soman

Created on: August 24, 2008

Ikariam is a online browser game featuring a world with thousands of other real players. One begins the game with a single town on an Island and must make buildings, troops and alliances to advance in the game. Ikariam began as a small game offered by a German company(Gameforge Productions GmbH) and has now spread around the world with over 12 different international servers. Ikariam enjoys a growing audience and is great for a complicated online multiplayer real-time empire building game. Of course, the game can be played for free and is much much better than Travian online.

In the game, you spawn with a small level 1 city on an Island. The neat feature of this game is that every player starts on an Island with specific resources. The resources in the game are Building Material, Wine, Marble, Crystal Glass and Sulfur. Each island has 1 building material and 1 random resource (such as wine or marble or crystal or sulfur). As your city grows and you build and expand your buildings, you can assign workers to exploit those resources for the glory of your empire. When big enough, you can move onto other Islands to start gathering resources there and expand your empire further.

The game's updates and news are integrated into the game via the "advisers." Every time something happens in your empire or some news-worthy event occurs, your advisers send you a notification. When you start the game, you will find that these advisers will be very crucial to stay up to-date on all the events in your empire. Overall the game offers some great gaming experience, advanced browser game features, complicated alliance systems and some great house of time-killing fun.

The game itself is fairly new. It was created on July 8th 2007 and the sad fact is that much of the game is still in beta version with numerous glitches and patches being fixed and applied to the game. The good news is that the game provides a forum for members to request help, report bugs or glitches and take care of in-game issues and the moderators are really fast and very customer friendly.

But for those wondering how to contact the game creators or a mod (if you were banned from the forums), i want to say that i have the solution to your problem. The man behind the game is called Klaas Kersting and his address is:

Albert-Nestler-Str. 8
Karlsruhe, DE 76131
DE

You may also call the company headquarters at +49.7213548080 or fax them your hate-mail at +49.721354808152. But your best bet lies with contacting them through email and the best email is tech@gameforge.de however customers and players are urged to email to info@gameforge.de

Anyway, Ikariam was a good game still and it can improve a bit more. It is currently in its beta stage with growing users turning to that game - most of those users from another German game called Travian. My recommendation is for you to try the game and see if you like it but be warned that this game can consume alot of your time especially if you get involved in alliances and wars. If you do not like browser games, then go out and buy a real game for your PC or your game console.

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