Oasis Review

You must guide the people of ancient Egypt to salvation in this elegant turn-based strategy game, which offers the simple but addictive charm of the classic board games you used to love to play (or maybe still do). In Oasis, you control a powerful sorcerer attempting to lead his people through the scorching desert. The object of each map is to overcome an inevitable barbarian raid. You have only a certain number of turns to explore the desert, discovering as many cities as possible, building roads to unite them, researching new military technology, and marshalling your defenses to meet the hordes head-on.

That might sound pretty complicated, but a typical game of Oasis takes just a few minutes. The game's clever design distills the gameplay down to the essentials, making for a briskly paced experience that's fun to play for minutes or hours at a time. Combat resolves automatically, depending on how numerous and well equipped your forces are compared to the enemy's forces. There's an element of luck involved, which keeps things from getting predictable. Various campaigns and multiple difficulty levels also help make Oasis suitable for players of all skill levels, and the game's got a great presentation too.