Game Review: Build Away! (Mobile – Free to Play)

Build Away by Future Play is one of the most pointless ‘idle builder’ games on the market. Barely an actual game where the goal is to tap the screen constantly to the point were your fingers & thumbs will begin to ache!

You have barely any control over what happens & its repetitive nature will bore incredibly quick. The title is very deceiving, with barely any building actually taking place. You place buildings as you unlock them & then spend the next couple of hours collecting the coins they drop. The coins are used to invest in construction of the buildings (effectively levelling them up) which in turn sees them spit out more profits. You also need to invest coins into power for the buildings which improves the production time.

At first it seems like a very generous system, investing in buildings & power is cheap & it won’t be long before they’re churning out a healthy profit at a steady rate. Then it becomes clear that to actually get anywhere in the game you need to swap the early buildings out for the more expensive, rarer ones. These ones give way more profit but the cost to level them up is eye-wateringly high.

The game slows to a crawl & no new buildings are unlocked as your own personal level up system barely moves once you hit 7 & above. After two days of being at level 8 & playing (read tapping) fairly regularly I wasn’t even half way to level 9.

Of course you can drop some real money into the game if you want to speed things up. The premium currency is gems & it’s easy to be deceived into believing the game is generous with giving these out during regular gameplay. However after about a week of playing I had 136 which gave me enough for one offer…to move the in-game clock forwards 4 hours.

It is also interesting to notice that the project of the game was sponsored by an online casino. The game has a large number of bonuses that can be obtained for real money. Online casinos Nederland are the most popular casinos in Europe, which provide a variety of games. You can find various games for real money or spin online slots for free with gems and diamonds. Therefore, this game also took this theme as a basis.

All of the gem related bonuses are based around moving the clock forward with the idea being that your buildings are spitting out such profits that by doing this you’re going to end up with more money then you can possibly spend. Sounds great, right?

Well, here’s the problem. You’re buildings will only give profit up to a certain amount, this amount is dictated by how much you’ve invested in construction & often that limit is reached within a few in-game hours. To collect the coins you have to start the game up, no automatic collection here.

Do you see the problem? Let’s say you spend the astronomical amount of 1200 gems to move the clock forward 7 days. That should be 7 days of profit but if your buildings have a limit that falls well short you won’t be making anymore coins. You might as well have not played it for a day, it would have amounted to the same thing!

I take issue with this system because of how deceiving it appears. The description below the purchase does not explain this, instead it describes how far forward the clock moves followed by the word ‘profit’. Nowhere does it say that it’s going to be limited by your own progression. Tricksy business.

If you were tempted to hit up that particular purchase the nearest amount of gems you could buy is 1500 for the staggering amount of £7.99. Put that into context alongside the hugely popular Super Mario Run, a game that cost £7.99 after the first three few levels. Pay that & the entire game is yours to play yet it is considered too high of a price (which it is!) but here for the same amount of money you get gems, worthless gems that allow you speed up the in-game time cycle.

Can you see the problem here?

None of this would be so bad if it had fun, interesting & exciting gameplay which it doesn’t in the slightest! It’s so lacking in decent content that it makes other free to play builder games look like an Elder Scrolls game by comparison.