Normally when I think of more casual strategy games, my mind tends to wander towards tower defense or things in that vein, but there are other avenues for the genre. While perhaps acting more as a time management sim, there’s still a fair amount of strategy in titles like Chimp Quest, at least once you get through the early tutorial-style levels. If your goal isn’t merely to survive, but to grab all of the stars for every stage, you’ll definitely need to begin to break into some serious strategy to meet those objectives.

As things start out your task isn’t very difficult, you’ll need to send the single chimp under your control to collect some resources to then use to complete specific tasks and it’s all very linear. It doesn’t take long for new structures that are tied to specialized chimps to show up, as well as boosts that you’ll be able to use on a cooldown that can give you some critical oomph when you need it to stay on track. As you go you’ll gain the ability to get additional worker chimps that will help you keep work going more consistently, and others like warriors who you’ll need to clear away threats… but anything more advanced you want to do will take resources, so keeping them coming in is crucial.

It’s once you have enough of these added elements to consider that the challenge and the strategic aspect of the game reveals itself. While you’ll likely want to stay task focused, keeping your little area expanding and moving towards your objectives, you’ll also need to be sure to constantly keep an eye out for resources that replenish themselves periodically, so you won’t run out of supplies at critical moments. Throw in multiple paths, making you determine what the critical order of clearing them should be, and then also trying to keep every chimp under your control spread out enough that you’re not creating bottlenecks, and it has a fair amount of challenge to it.

In the end, this can be a reasonably good casual strategy experience. It isn’t time management in quite the same way as you’d normally think of it, with you more acting as the central dispatcher of work than being in the thick of the tasks themselves, but you’ll need to be very mindful of every detail to be successful. The good thing is that pretty well regardless of your performance you’ll almost always be able to move forward, the advanced challenges are just there if you’re looking to demonstrate how on top of things you are. It isn’t a great game, but it is a reasonably good one.