So this is one of the only app games I've had on my phone and kept for such a few months. This is a combination of a few kinds of mini games wrapped up in a pretty nice little package. Only reason I'm removing it now is just to clear some space and go back down to three games (from 5). Too many of the ones I had required to frequent an upkeep to remain "active." May definitely come back to it someday, but just gonna pass for a while and play a few others out to completion. I actually got into this when I saw Markiplier plug it on his channel, the interactivity seemed interesting and gave it a shot -- that was many months ago. Of the 300ish monsters I've acquired 130.
So the features of this game are kind of varied so I'll try to describe as many of them as best I can.
Battles - they have three subdivisions of battles: 1) PVP versus other players in a 3v3 battle; 2) Adventure Map which resembles the classic level-to-level progression; 3) finally there are the dungeons, which were my personal favorite. These are temporary and always geared around your individual level offering varying difficulties and rewards for doing such. 1 & 2 were fairly unforgiving depending on your strength and level.
Breeding - one of the major features is breeding monsters to discover new ones. Discover is kind of misleading as you can always see the monsters in their encyclopedic book or dex. Now some of the full images and statistics remain hidden until you find them, but you always get a thumbnail and their name minimum. This was kind of the final straw sealing its fate, just too much RNG with little to no sense built into its scaffolding. Breeding time ranges from seconds to multi-days with hatching taking a comparable time as well. As such many times you have extra things waiting on the next stop.
Enhancement - through use of the Monster Lab and Rune Farm you can increase the base stats of your monsters, over powering them from their original maximums. You can boost a monster's max level by up to 20; and the runes increase in power up to level 10 (takes 4 of each level to guarantee the next power up).
Island Events - so the premise of this game is floating isles similar to Quest for Epic Loot, but they host your monsters rather than a castle you actively defend. As such you occasionally spawn an event isle with a theme or limited-release activity for you to participate in. They seem to have a good assortment of events and never so long as I played replayed the same event back-to-back. The one at the moment consists of illusion. Each of these has the opportunity to drop at least one Legendary monster and unlock the creature.
Material Farming - akin to almost every browser-based, click-heavy game (practically anything on Facebook) you "grow" resources that are used to level and strengthen your monsters: food and gold in this case.
Monsters - the art style is typically exaggerated and cartoonish, but there are a few that I thought were well designed and "attractive" for lack of a better word.
Stores, Assorted - almost every game type offers a pay-to-win store to unlock rare monsters or powerful runes. Now whales will fill these slots very quickly, but the vast majority are not completely unavailable to the rest of us (cheap bastard here, remember). As many of the activities offer the in game currency (gems) as rewards. It just takes time to accumulate them and luck that something you desire is available at that time.
The Negatives:
1) Upkeep, the recharge on the stamina to attack refills from zero to four (max battles per reset) is under a half hour so the alerts are annoyingly short lived between breaks. Active players can rarely be considered "casual" due to such quick turn-around times.
2) Undependable RNG - while there are some set percentiles for breeding a particular monster, there are way too many that make either little sense (if any) as to how or are available full time. Many of the more powerful monsters aren't available except during limited-time events where they enter the breeding possibility (usually at a 1% drop rate). Some of the rarest monsters don't show in the monster book, but are indeed possible -- at the same 1% drop rate from almost any legendary pairing. Most monster pairings netted 70%, 50%, 30%, 10%, 7.5%, 5% or 2.5%.
3) Community - there is a updated wiki, but I can't say it's the easiest to navigate, read, or understand how its organized I've ever used. There is also a sub-reddit, but it's usually a ghost town and threads go days without a view let alone a comment. The times people do respond were very helpful, friendly, or informative. Just not a very dependable community imho.
4) VIP - here's the exclusive whale or premium-pay rewards. There are an established set of monsters deemed VIP and are only offered at limited intervals for $20 IAP. Only once did I ever see one of these possible and it was reported at a 0.1% breeding-drop rate.
5) Ability upgrades - there is zero warning to what you're going to get at the 5-level intervals to learn a new skill, each interval has a pool of powers to randomly offer [one] the player and there's no guarantee it will be more powerful than anything you already have. You also cannot tell explicitly what an attack will do (stats yes, but not exactly how it will compare hit-for-hit). As such there's also no guarantee you will gain access to every power in their arsenal in the course of leveling them up.
There was very little that made the game unplayable and I did enjoy it for quite a while considering any of these short-lived free games tend to cycle off my phone within a month.
If any of this sounds interesting give it a try, but have patience as it will take a while to achieve self-sustainable rotations.
B-
Available on iOS and Android; also as a facebook browser game.
No comments:
Post a Comment