Overview: The Facebook RPG has come a long way in the last few years. Castle Age is true to its text-only, timer-driven roots, but takes the click-to-do-quest basis and extends it to make a truly engaging game. The art is classic Eastern-influenced fantasy (lots of very pretty men and scantily-clad women) and the interface is familiar to anyone who played any of the early “mob” games.

The tutorial guides you through clicking to quest and changing Generals (a fillip that gains more meaning later on, as each General has advantages and disadvantanges) and brings you to your first boss fight. The boss monsters are one of the better aspects of Castle Age – they’re basically monsters that require large amounts of Stamina to defeat. The early ones can be defeated alone, if you’re patient, but the later ones require help from your friends.

Boss monsters drop loot, which is, of course, the primary reason to kill them. Alchemy loot, which are items that can be combined with other items, makes the very best gear. Some Alchemy items are gained through gifts from friends and some is earned by killing boss monsters of various sizes. New items and Alchemical combinations are constantly being added, including items that enable you to summon new boss monsters and items that increase the bonus of certain Generals.

The player-vs.player subgame is also quite robust. There is a basic dueling system with two options: one compares your chosen General equipped with your best items, and one compares the size of your army and the number of Generals and items in your inventory. This dual system allows both people with lots of friends and people with few friends to find equitable match-ups. There are also two other PvP-based systems: the Raid, which is very similar to the boss monster system, except you attack random players instead of just hitting a button to spend your stamina, and the Arena system, which is not currently active, but tracked players’ performance against other volunteers for a set period of time. All three systems award loot comparable to (or identical to) the monster loot.

The real-money system adds a lot of flavor without substantially unbalancing the game. You can spend Favor Points on energy or stamina refills, monthly Generals and items, or treasure chests that offer random, possibly excellent, rewards. As is typical, you can earn Favor Points through normal play as well, albeit slowly.

There are downsides. The game can get terribly spammy with all the requests for help with monsters and the constant flow of gifts, and while there is a constant stream of new content, new systems are relatively rare and the existing ones get repetitive fast. Overall, though, if you like doing quests, leveling up, and gathering loot, Castle Age is a solid offering.