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.
Showing posts with label Free2Play. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Free2Play. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 4, 2016
Tuesday, April 12, 2016
Marvel Puzzle Quest (2013)
More & more 'match three' games...
So one thing I have learned about myself is I like puzzle games. I exhaustively cleared 3 Tangram app games a few years ago, and my longest running mobile games is another of this variety (PAD). That said there are more than a few out there and most hearken back to the granddaddy of the genre, Bejeweled. Now rather than every single one being a carbon copy recreation with a fresh (or semi-clean) shirt, there are some key distinctions between them:
1) how much you can move a piece - sometimes you can only swap two adjacent pieces, other times you can drag and drop a single piece all over the board, occasionally the orbs drop in free-fall and you can only clear them where 3 or more intersect, once I found a game where you has x seconds to adjacent swap as many as you could in the time.
2) number of colors (for matches) and unique orbs - usually the minimum I've seen is three colors, but I've seen upwards of 8 in different games, which tend to scale with difficulty. There are also proprietary "special" tiles that vary from game to game. Some destroy a row, column, or predefined shape among the chaos; others remove or manipulate a specific hue from the pool; others manipulate the board in any innumerable possible ways. Poison, jammer, indestructable are just some of the other varieties.
3) additional formats - this genre is perhaps so over-saturated that fresh faces have to get you with a gimmick or incorporating another style within the game itself. I'll go into one examples below, but genre-targetted apps like Doctor Who: Legacy uses skins of characters from the show (wow, that sounds dark suddenly).
So by-and-large this is one of the primary game-types I adhere to, and while I burnout on some individual versions for one reason or another, I have yet to clear them all off of my device ever.
[Marvel Puzzle Quest] (Mobile, Apple or Android; PC, Steam) 2013
I'll admit I got roped in by the Marvel skinned app and it had some familiar if fresh takes on the whole RPG team and card collecting formats that added an interesting change of gameplay for me. I'm usually [yawn] at RPG team builders unless I have a lot more control and prettier pictures (i.e FFX); I also usually skip card-based video games of all kinds, save a brief forray with Yu-Gi-Oh when I was younger on principle alone. Also upon research I see this 'fresh' take is 3 years old :P
So you assemble a group of 3 characters (enemies or villains) restricted only by them populating your painfully inadequate collection. Now the cards themselves didn't really pose a problem as I had 2 semi-rare ones when I dropped the game after playing less than 2 months. My major complaint with this game was the limited and expensive box space. They are not shy about giving you chances at cards (lots of commons, but even my first day I had 2 premium pulls ready to go), you only get 3-4 slots initially and it costs more and more to add slots until I had 2 6-slot pages and it wanted over 500 ?gold coins? (I was never told what the other resources were called) to get another.
These cards, however, have levels as well as up to three individual power each with their own nuance. The card levels were unlocked by adding and fusing additional power cards together (up to 13 cumulative points where you had to decide between 5-5-3 or 5-4-4 builds on your key players). Once the higher level was possible, you used in-app rewards Iso-8 (a Marvel staple for who knows how long) and grind them up in ever increasing quantities. My complaint here is limited to its steep loss you suffered if you dumped it into one card then chose to retire it in place of another. A common trope in these style games, but still annoying knowing not all do this.
This game also lacks any kind of roster or unlock system to further incentivize collecting the individual characters. For an achievement hound/collector in me, this is a very sad realization. Unfortunately, taking up quite a few precious card slots are full 1-star and 2-star (rarity and power based) ranked teams that are used as part of the daily incentive quest (Deadpool). Additionally you have to have "daily random character X" in order to run for additional daily rewards. These further exasperated the restricted nature of your collection box and were the primary reason I opted out of further playing.
Now I liked the idea of keeping pre-set teams as you leveled in order to clear particular content. I loved the way the app handled the variety of 3-4 game types: prologue, story events, and pvp content. Instead of everyone pooled into the single event and scrambling up invisible ladders, you could select your own (I believe of 7 possible) time slot and play (or not) to your heart's content. I finished in the top 3 on the last two events I participated in, unlocking a 3-powered Daredevil and Colossus respectively.
All in all it was a nice game and if I weren't as invested in PAD I might have considered this to be my primary game app. 8/10
So one thing I have learned about myself is I like puzzle games. I exhaustively cleared 3 Tangram app games a few years ago, and my longest running mobile games is another of this variety (PAD). That said there are more than a few out there and most hearken back to the granddaddy of the genre, Bejeweled. Now rather than every single one being a carbon copy recreation with a fresh (or semi-clean) shirt, there are some key distinctions between them:
1) how much you can move a piece - sometimes you can only swap two adjacent pieces, other times you can drag and drop a single piece all over the board, occasionally the orbs drop in free-fall and you can only clear them where 3 or more intersect, once I found a game where you has x seconds to adjacent swap as many as you could in the time.
2) number of colors (for matches) and unique orbs - usually the minimum I've seen is three colors, but I've seen upwards of 8 in different games, which tend to scale with difficulty. There are also proprietary "special" tiles that vary from game to game. Some destroy a row, column, or predefined shape among the chaos; others remove or manipulate a specific hue from the pool; others manipulate the board in any innumerable possible ways. Poison, jammer, indestructable are just some of the other varieties.
3) additional formats - this genre is perhaps so over-saturated that fresh faces have to get you with a gimmick or incorporating another style within the game itself. I'll go into one examples below, but genre-targetted apps like Doctor Who: Legacy uses skins of characters from the show (wow, that sounds dark suddenly).
So by-and-large this is one of the primary game-types I adhere to, and while I burnout on some individual versions for one reason or another, I have yet to clear them all off of my device ever.
[Marvel Puzzle Quest] (Mobile, Apple or Android; PC, Steam) 2013
I'll admit I got roped in by the Marvel skinned app and it had some familiar if fresh takes on the whole RPG team and card collecting formats that added an interesting change of gameplay for me. I'm usually [yawn] at RPG team builders unless I have a lot more control and prettier pictures (i.e FFX); I also usually skip card-based video games of all kinds, save a brief forray with Yu-Gi-Oh when I was younger on principle alone. Also upon research I see this 'fresh' take is 3 years old :P
So you assemble a group of 3 characters (enemies or villains) restricted only by them populating your painfully inadequate collection. Now the cards themselves didn't really pose a problem as I had 2 semi-rare ones when I dropped the game after playing less than 2 months. My major complaint with this game was the limited and expensive box space. They are not shy about giving you chances at cards (lots of commons, but even my first day I had 2 premium pulls ready to go), you only get 3-4 slots initially and it costs more and more to add slots until I had 2 6-slot pages and it wanted over 500 ?gold coins? (I was never told what the other resources were called) to get another.
These cards, however, have levels as well as up to three individual power each with their own nuance. The card levels were unlocked by adding and fusing additional power cards together (up to 13 cumulative points where you had to decide between 5-5-3 or 5-4-4 builds on your key players). Once the higher level was possible, you used in-app rewards Iso-8 (a Marvel staple for who knows how long) and grind them up in ever increasing quantities. My complaint here is limited to its steep loss you suffered if you dumped it into one card then chose to retire it in place of another. A common trope in these style games, but still annoying knowing not all do this.
This game also lacks any kind of roster or unlock system to further incentivize collecting the individual characters. For an achievement hound/collector in me, this is a very sad realization. Unfortunately, taking up quite a few precious card slots are full 1-star and 2-star (rarity and power based) ranked teams that are used as part of the daily incentive quest (Deadpool). Additionally you have to have "daily random character X" in order to run for additional daily rewards. These further exasperated the restricted nature of your collection box and were the primary reason I opted out of further playing.
Now I liked the idea of keeping pre-set teams as you leveled in order to clear particular content. I loved the way the app handled the variety of 3-4 game types: prologue, story events, and pvp content. Instead of everyone pooled into the single event and scrambling up invisible ladders, you could select your own (I believe of 7 possible) time slot and play (or not) to your heart's content. I finished in the top 3 on the last two events I participated in, unlocking a 3-powered Daredevil and Colossus respectively.
All in all it was a nice game and if I weren't as invested in PAD I might have considered this to be my primary game app. 8/10
Saturday, May 16, 2015
The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot (2015)
The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot (2015*)
Ubisoft Montreal
PC
Arcade, Multi, Free2Play
Short one today as I attempted to grab an older title that I thought I'd played sufficiently and would require little refresher and I'd have it reviewed and could move on. At very few if any points in this transaction did any of that happen. Let me start off by assuming that I was in some kind of beta or early access for this because I remember playing it a bit in late 2013 or mid 2014 so the February 2015 date listed on the Steam page is incomplete or outright wrong. This makes no sense to me. The game from what I can gather has also changed drastically in the interval I was not playing to the point I am level 20 and have nothing in my castle but the starter resource nodes (x2). Previously I'd bought or hired traps, creatures, bosses to keep my loot safe and my many other nodes in working order. I couldn't figure out how to manage my lack of resources and the UI has a poor interface that lets you do nothing you want to where it would seem logical, everything must be selected, them toggled what you're doing, then proceed. Clunky does not even begin to cover it and I was so hoping for something a bit better. I guess I should say the reason I came back is in a game code trade I got a pet or something and decided to try it out. Well it follows me around and 'helps' but I have a semi-large, empty castle and now you apparently have to craft or summon the items using mats I did not have nor any idea how to get them. The game had just changed too much and was not being of any use for me to 1) rectify it or b) begin anew so I could learn again. Possibly I will try again on my smurf account (non-standard, usually just for extra storage or extraneous attempts at similar circumstances.
3/10
That said let me tell you why I wish it was better. The comical cartoons and the art style are very nice and approachable. It gives the impression od a Clash of Clans style game without (previously) all the strategic management of resources. I acquaint the minor sarcastic humor to the similar 'kid at heart' jokes present in alot of animated films and kids' shows you see today (I have younger cousins, some of my friends have kids, etc I HAVE seen some recent kiddie programs). There is nothing endearing me to attempt any further progress on my main account as it is free to play anyway so until I get around to doing this, "au revoir."
Ubisoft Montreal
PC
Arcade, Multi, Free2Play
Short one today as I attempted to grab an older title that I thought I'd played sufficiently and would require little refresher and I'd have it reviewed and could move on. At very few if any points in this transaction did any of that happen. Let me start off by assuming that I was in some kind of beta or early access for this because I remember playing it a bit in late 2013 or mid 2014 so the February 2015 date listed on the Steam page is incomplete or outright wrong. This makes no sense to me. The game from what I can gather has also changed drastically in the interval I was not playing to the point I am level 20 and have nothing in my castle but the starter resource nodes (x2). Previously I'd bought or hired traps, creatures, bosses to keep my loot safe and my many other nodes in working order. I couldn't figure out how to manage my lack of resources and the UI has a poor interface that lets you do nothing you want to where it would seem logical, everything must be selected, them toggled what you're doing, then proceed. Clunky does not even begin to cover it and I was so hoping for something a bit better. I guess I should say the reason I came back is in a game code trade I got a pet or something and decided to try it out. Well it follows me around and 'helps' but I have a semi-large, empty castle and now you apparently have to craft or summon the items using mats I did not have nor any idea how to get them. The game had just changed too much and was not being of any use for me to 1) rectify it or b) begin anew so I could learn again. Possibly I will try again on my smurf account (non-standard, usually just for extra storage or extraneous attempts at similar circumstances.
3/10
That said let me tell you why I wish it was better. The comical cartoons and the art style are very nice and approachable. It gives the impression od a Clash of Clans style game without (previously) all the strategic management of resources. I acquaint the minor sarcastic humor to the similar 'kid at heart' jokes present in alot of animated films and kids' shows you see today (I have younger cousins, some of my friends have kids, etc I HAVE seen some recent kiddie programs). There is nothing endearing me to attempt any further progress on my main account as it is free to play anyway so until I get around to doing this, "au revoir."
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