Subterfuge Review

Few games have made me feel both intelligent and like a terrible person, but Subterfuge is one of them. Subterfuge is a mobile game in which you’re forced to make difficult diplomatic decisions, chatting to real-life players in order to hash out deals and coordinate simultaneous attacks. Maybe you’ll decide to ally with a neighbouring player, only to backstab them a couple of hours down the line. Maybe you’ll choose to play the warmonger, destroying every player that stands in your way. Or maybe you’ll play the pacifist, allying with everyone and sending gifts to sweeten your relationships.

Each game of Subterfuge lasts about a week. That sounds like a huge commitment but you only play for a couple of minutes a day, seeing as everything occurs in real-time. The aim is to produce 200kg of the precious resource ‘Neptunium’ by building mines, whilst simultaneously protecting your Queen. If your Queen dies, you lose. If another player mines 200kg of Neptunium before you, you lose.

At the start of the game you control a small group of submarines (drillers) that must spread out and capture neutral outposts to form the basis for your underwater empire. As you spread your drillers across the map you capture factory outposts and generator outposts which produce more drillers and increase the speed at which you can make drillers. Once you’ve manufactured enough drillers you can start constructing mines or waging war against your opponents.

In Subterfuge your drillers act as both your military force and your workers. This means that you must balance mining and defending your kingdom. If you don’t have enough subs defending, then your enemies may try to take your base. If you have too many subs defending then you won’t be mining enough Neptunium and, therefore, won’t win (unless you decide to take everyone’s mines by force, you evil Machiavel!). This means that you have to make the decision of whether to trust your alliances with other players, leaving yourself unarmed, or to wage war, enraging other players.

From early on it becomes clear that relationships with other players are crucial. At the beginning of a game you’ll probably want to take over as many outposts as possible, but this comes at the price of potentially annoying neighbouring players. This may prove costly later in the game if an angry neighbour then decides to repay you with outright war. Unlike Civilization V which places restrictions on your relationships with other nations, such as the cooldown period after signing a peace treaty, in Subterfuge you are given complete freedom to do as you please. This means that alliances are fragile and can be betrayed at any moment.

This is where chat function comes into play and it’s vital to winning the game. If you form strong relationships with other players by talking to them, then maybe, just maybe, they won’t try to decimate you. You can conduct multiple private chats at once, meaning that you can create a small group chat to co-ordinate attacks but at the same time chat privately to another player, pouring poison into their ear with dodgy information.

This brings me back to what I first said; Subterfuge made me feel both intelligent and like a terrible person. Being given the freedom to act how I liked without restriction allowed me to befriend and betray whoever I pleased. This makes me sound like a bad person but I guarantee that you’ll be conjuring similar schemes once you’re absorbed by the game.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed playing Subterfuge, there were a few things that held it back. Firstly, the tutorials were rather dense and complicated. It seemed impenetrably intricate and intimidating when I first started playing, which may be a high barrier of entry for some players. There were also some technical issues, such as crashing and occasionally failing to log in, but fortunately these issues did not ruin the game. What I found most frustrating was the ‘Monopoly syndrome’ that Subterfuge begins to suffer from once one player starts to dominate. At this point I found that some players became disheartened. They realised that the poor decisions they made early in the game had set them up for failure. As a result I found that players would abandon games, which was frustrating after having put so much time into the game.

Subterfuge is a great mobile game which gives you the strategic freedom to create dastardly schemes to defeat your enemies - emulating real-world political power-struggles. The focus on personal relationships is intriguing and makes Subterfuge very replayable, with different situations presenting themselves depending on who you play against. Although there are some minor setbacks, they hardly hinder an interesting and enjoyable experience.