Brutal Age: Horde Invasion

Before TAP4FUN sent monkeys to space in Age of Apes, it sent orcs to the Stone Age. Brutal Age: Horde Invasion is the studio's September 2016 MMO strategy game, in which you play a Warchief forging a tribe across a shared prehistoric world: build strongholds, terraform the land itself, hunt mammoths, and burn the borders of players on the other side of the globe.

What the loop feels like

Your settlement hums through its queues: the Stronghold levels, resource pits fill, and the barracks train Warriors, Shamans and Beast Masters for the day's hunt. You pick a mammoth from the map, march out with a Partner leading the column, and bring the whole beast home in spoils. That's Brutal Age.

Then the clan machinery starts. A Rally goes out against a rival stronghold, your army marches with a dozen clanmates, and the border of your territory rolls forward over scorched ground. Terraforming a tile into mountain or swamp changes what it defends, and the Wonder waits at the top of the world. That's Brutal Age.

How it actually works

The base layer is settlement management: upgrading the Stronghold, barracks and resource pits for food, wood, stone, gold and magic crystals, with Stronghold level gating troop tiers, research and march sizes. Troops run a rock-paper-scissors combat triangle across distinct unit types. Partners are the hero layer: collectible prehistoric chieftains, hunters and monsters who lead armies with passive and active buffs, and whose star upgrades run on a feed loop of experience and duplicate units, with fully-skilled lower-star heroes often outperforming natural five-stars. The shared world map hosts monster hunts, resource gathering and multi-player Rallies, and terraforming turns territory into mountain, lake, forest or swamp. Equippable War Patterns and runes layer modifiers on top.

Where it stumbles

The modern verdict is blunt. Community consensus across store reviews holds that progress stalls without substantial spending, with competitive high-level play described in terms of thousands of dollars, and the game now occupies an aging niche kept warm by a few legacy spenders. Update history has punished free players, with changes to resource protection making it easy for non-paying players to be farmed and stripped by whales. Support responsiveness draws recurring complaints. As a design it is a competent 2016 template; as a 2026 proposition it asks a lot for a tribe.

Playing it today

Free on both stores with in-app purchases, still running after nearly a decade and holding a positive store rating from its remaining base across thousands of ratings. Get it on the App Store for iOS or on Google Play for Android. For the same studio's newer and lighter take on tribe warfare, see our Age of Apes entry, and for strategy that fits in a browser tab, Civilization Clicker compresses history instead.

The verdict

A prehistoric-flavoured MMO strategy with a genuinely fun terraforming twist and a monster-hunt loop that still works. Bring a clan and low expectations for the economy, or bring a wallet.