Oasis Review

Perfectly anticipating and representing the increasing number of casual games, Oasis is a well-composed strategy/puzzle game released for Windows in 2005. Described as "one-part Civilization" and "one-part Minesweeper", the game allows you to explore different scenarios (eg the Egyptian king's son vows to retake his dead father's kingdom) by exploring random maps in search of powerful glyphs. The 10x10 maps start fully covered by the fog of war, and your goal is not only to find the glyphs, but also to uncover and develop enough cities so that you can defend against the barbarians who want to destroy/capture this glyph. This provides a nice tension between exploration (you only have 85 turns) and development (each act of road-building or mining costs a turn as well).

Each round, a new random map is loaded, full of camp followers, mountains of ore, and the oasis where the glyph is to be found. This provides that useful "reset" feature, where performance the round before affects your score, but does not affect your present situation either positively or negatively. You can then enjoy the puzzle that the current level presents. How many directions will the barbarians come from? How should I spend my turns? No matter what course you take, however, the game provides positive feedback through the discovery of something useful -- battle technology or an improved civilization or extra points. Some squares are blank, but the terrain features do provide a reasonable means of heading towards useful territory. That is, the largest desert has the most followers, cities are surrounded by farms, oases are always on the edge etc. Learning these few rules helps to improve your success at your desired strategy.

Are there flaws in the game? Well, of course, you have to like this hybrid distillation of theme and genre. If you don't like civilization building in any way, even this mild incarnation may bother you. Likewise the puzzler element of finding the richest sections of the map. Since I've only played the demo, I also don't know how well it holds together between scenarios (since the game apparently switches milieus and eras once you finish a narrative arc). Being the casual game that it is, Oasis likely holds up fairly well to the minimal expectations it creates here. The narrative arcs presented seem to provide forward impetus and continuity in reasonable ways, without creating too much expectation for excellent drama.

I'm also a little concerned about the game's difficulty. Even on the easiest setting, it appeared that the number of barbarians eventually overwhelmed anything you could reasonably oppose them with. Further exploration of the game and better strategies is likely the solution here.

In the end, Oasis holds up as an excellent example of a single-player casual game. It's easy to get into, pleasantly addictive, and provides enough complexity and narrative involvement to hold the attention.