Torn City

[Badnik Mechanic]

Torn as it's now called is a browser game (ewwwww Browser games). It's also quite an addictive browser game, I've been playing it nearly daily for 1072 days... or to put it another way just under 3 years.

A typical home page. (people don't like advertising who they are when they take screenshots, hence the black paint.)

Torn is a game based on crime, you start out in the city with relatively nothing, just a small lump sum of cash and a shack. You then have the choice, what do I do now?

Either go at it alone so you decide how you level up and play, this meaning using energy at the gym to improve your stats, attacking other players in order to steal their cash, attacking other players just to gain experience and level up. Or become a 'slut' that’s in game slang for letting other players attack you in order to get experience which they should pay you money for.

Or... join a terrorist faction, you can join group crimes and even wage war on other factions, also many factions will pay you to join them and offer you weapons and better housing as well as various other benefits, but, they normally do ask that you help out in wars which means using energy that you'd normally use for crimes.

Or... read the ingame newspaper and hunt people down to collect bounties?

As progress through the game, very quickly you'll start to unlock various in game missions that you can do for cash and item rewards. They're spread out in a way that keeps the game entertaining as well as giving you a challenge. Often the missions will involve you attacking an NPC and then reporting to another NPC in order to get your reward or further instructions.

Do you join one of the default jobs which offer good cash gains and good specials to level up? Or do you join one of the user companies to get ahead? Quite often these will give you fantastic specials and benefits, but poor cash.

Or... do you cheat your way to victory. Yes scamming other players is allowed, you can get VERY rich by doing this very quickly, however, scamming is greatly looked down upon and you will find yourself on many bounty lists and hit lists, sometimes putting you out of the game forever.

Crimes will be your main source of income when you start out, you need to get crime experience in order to do harder crimes which will reward you greatly. For instance, you'll start by gaining just a few hundred dollars, but then you'll get a few thousand dollars... to eventually getting into 6 figure rewards from your crimes.

One reason why I've been playing the game for so long is that it's constantly evolving and changing, they're always adding new features and perks to the game which do over time give you some amazing benefits, e.g. an ingame stock market, there’s the ability to buy and customise a car for racing, you can travel to South Africa and hunt animals for money (the cash gains on this one are very impressive for new players.) set up and run a company, set up and run your own ingame shop, become a drug runner for someone, or gamble at the casino and even bet on real life events (and yes they are very wide ranging and diverse, so if you live in the US or the UK there will be games you can bet on with good knowledge, heck they even have the Irish football league on there!).

Edit: In fact, at the time of typing this, they've just changed their main page to include a new design.

Main casino page, typically I can win around 5-10 million here a day here... but I have lost over 30 million on a bad day... whoops!

Also they recently added their own achievement system which rewards you for doing various challenges and reaching various milestones, you're rewarded with both an honor bar and a merit which you can trade in to improve yourself. Want more crime success? Life points? The ability to use weapons better or put enemies in the hospital for longer? It's completely up to you.

A small example of the achievements page, when you click honors or medals it opens up to display every award possible.

You can swap merits to customise your character in hundreds of ways, some are better than others (don't use them on casino tokens!)

Another reason why I've played the game for as long as I have and why many users have played the game for even longer is that the game does have a kind of unlock system. For instance, you cannot travel to other countries until you reach a certain level, missions also unlock once you reach a certain level, the city bank doesn't unlock until you reach a certain level. This may sound like a downer for new players, but actually, it's a benefit, it would be very easy to do everything in one day if you got the chance, but a level unlock system gives you something to work for and you really do feel a sense of satisfaction once you've reached that stage.

But if you really want to level up quickly, there’s so many guides now you can easily get to a good level very quickly if you wanted to.

During the last year Torn also started to do special events, which are completely voluntary as to if you take part or not, they normally last for a month but add lots of fun as well as rewards to players.

For example, early last year they introduced Zombies, which basically involved the entire city population were civilians except for a select few players (all low levels) the goan was to survive for as long as possible without becoming a zombie (I lasted around 9 days), when you attacked a civilian as a zombie you had the option to infect the civilian and had the chance to rip off that players head and keep it as an item, civilians could also attack zombies and have the chance to find their brains!

Another event was a world war (I did not participate) which you could join a country (including gay pride and pirates!) and then fight against everyone else at a chance to win the war, all participants got a special honor/merit, the top 10 countries got a prize and the top country got a special item which is now worth around 200 million dollars to other players since they're now collector items.

Another event was the TC challenge, a number of challenges were set up and you had 1 month to do them all (they were all very doable) and you got some very nice prizes, and the Mr & Mrs Torn contest, all players could enter and everyone that did got a prize.

Also every Christmas and Halloween, special areas of the city open which allows players to find new and rare items for free, these can be used by the players or sold on for often a lot of money. Sometimes a special NPC will appear that can be killed (over the course of a few days due to it's supremely high life and stats) whoever gets the final hit is normally rewarded with a very unique weapon or insanely high cash reward.

An example of what the special towns look like.

Crack the code and win LOTS of items! It's quite easy when you know what the colours mean

Rare events:

A few years ago, the game released a Dirty Bomb item, it can only be made by creating it by combining several very rare items and by being in a good faction. The dirty bomb is a device which impacts EVERY player in the game, so far there have been 4 dirty bomb detonations in the game, the results of it are devastating for the target faction and it's members (two days in hospital), non members of the faction get get radiation sickness or trampled by the panicked mob who are trying to escape the city. Air travel shuts down so you can't escape the bomb. It impacts everyone.

They're very rare and at the moment it sorta happens on a one per year basis, and the last one occurred back in December 2010, the last one occurred in December 2009. Due to how hard they are to make and how long it takes, most players just want them as a status symbol as opposed to using them. So far only 4 of them have been dropped (one user has dropped 2 bombs) and I've only ever been in the hospital from one bomb blast.

So if a bomb goes off, it doesn't mean you'll suffer. But it's great when you log in and your screen comes up with a dirty bomb warning, and it slowly fades away and you discover if you got hit by it or not.

The game is fun, but unlike a lot of browser games, even if you lose at a fight, get mugged or fail a crime, it's not the end of the world, you'll recover quickly. It's up to you just how you play the game, whilst there is a wrong way to play it, unless you don't pay any attention to what’s going on you'll do fine.

There is a community of sorts which has expanded to twitter and facebook in recent years, there are also forums which are a little aggressive at times (it is a fighting/crime game after all. But you can make some very good friends on there very easily, some people I've been friends with for as long as I've been a member there. Would you believe that some users have actually gotten married from meeting people on there! Crazy as it sounds it does happen, there’s that many people playing it and so much social interaction relationships can form.

Fighting: Fighting is quite cool, you have battle stats and the higher your stats, the better you do, you also can equip weapons and armour, each having their own benefits and weak points so even if you have poorer stats than someone else, that doesn't mean you'll lose. When you enter battle you have a choice of what weapon you want to use and if you want to use temporary weapons or stat enhancers to improve your chances at winning. During the fight you can see where the other player has hit you and where you have hit the other player, hitting different body parts results in greater/lesser damage. After you finish the fight you have 3 choices, leave them (less hospital time for your target, more XP for you) mug them (more hosp time, less XP, but a chance for you to get their money) Hospitalise them (no XP, but tons of hospital time for the victim, only do this for when you chain in your faction.)

Torn is a very large game, the community in total is in the tens of thousands, as a result there are several help sites around like TCBasic (which I happen to be a staffer at) which contains thousands of tutorials and pieces of information to help both new and older players with everything, from drug taking to missions. If you've got a query about anything in the game it's there. Torn also recently got it's own wiki site, most of the stuff is copied from TCbasic, but some info is different which is handy.

Firefox enhancement. There has been several plug-ins made for torn which greatly enhance the game, I don't use them myself (don't use firefox to justify it) but many of the plug-ins greatly improve the game and are legal (under the sites rules and TOS), so try them out if you are interested, but they are not supported by Torn staff, so don't complain to them if you have problems with them.

Now for the appeal.

If my small review of it has interested you and you fancy joining. Could I beg of you to sign up using my referral link when you register? Yeah I know it's cheap of me to ask. But recently they changed the referral system and it really would mean a lot if you did use my link. When you visit the site using my link, just got to sign up and it should work. If you've got any problems send me a PM on here and I'll walk you through it.

Also if you do sign up and use my referral link, I might be able to reward you with some large cash incentives, like say $500,000 ingame dollars and 1,000,000 dollars when you hit level 10. However I'll need to look into this since theres been an issue with another player who has been caught cheating thats currently started a debate as to if you can reward people who you get to join the game.

So if you fancy joining the game, please use my link.

Also does anyone else play this? If so who are you and how long have you been playing for?

Edited January 9, 2011 by Hogfather