Introduction Dark Souls Like games up until recently were amongst the most unrated mobile gaming thankfully a lot of developers build a community for it by bringing a lot of ports to mobile. With that said I’m going to be showing the best. We’ve got …
Champions Arena is a 3D Turn-based RPG published by Gala Games Inc, with a new Play to Earn(P2E) system inside the game for Android and PC.
The game revolves around collecting champions to fight using cards system for battle. Champions Arena also contains Idle, tactical and management components for both PVE and PVP.
Tutorial has always played an important part of a game, specially when a game has complex or multiple mechanics that may be hard to grasp at the beginning. It’s also a deciding factor whether the player stay or leave the game early on.
As for Champions Arena, the tutorial manage to cover the important part of the game and is rather straightforward. However, the fact that’s it a long tutorial and that you can’t explore the game features is a bummer.
To avoid a wall of text for the tutorial part, i will write the important part for each battle. Here’s what happens in your Tutorial:
Once you’ve completed Campaign 2-5, you have completed the tutorial. Despite a lack of story or dialogue, the tutorial still feels too long as you don’t have any skip battle or skill animation at the start. Good luck those who are trying to Re-roll.
Champions Arena is a P2E game that everyone been waiting with big expectation from Gala Games. However after the tutorial and the amount of hurdle awaiting a F2P to be able to earn is ridiculous.
I find it very hard to believe that it is the case. Many youtubers and influencers that promoted the game as the best P2E game that came out so far. The game is just over hyped, Champions Arena is just another gacha RPG with nothing special.
Let’s dive into more details about the game mechanics, gacha, graphics and monetization, specially the play to earn part of the game.
To be honest I’m very surprised that the game offers so much gifts, daily log in, rewards rotate on each 14 days and you also get reward after each maintenance.
You will obtain resources like gold, champion experience, Lapis, Essense, Resources Chest and Summoning Ticket. Basically everything you need to help you play the game and progress.
While all of this seems super F2P friendly, it is not entirely true. As Champions Arena won’t give you any gems. Gem is extremely important to unlock features like link, reset, transfer level and most importantly trading. We will talk more about it later.
After the tutorial, you should have a grasp what waiting for you during your whole gameplay of Champions Arena. If not, here’s a brief explanation how the games work.
Your a summoner that can bring up 4 champions into battle.Choose between 4 different class namely Tank, Healer, Caster and Attacker.
Those champions will be at your command , meaning they will need your help to use skill when fighting and also you have summoners spell that you can use provided you have enough mana.
The skill is represented to you in a card system of 3 element. Each element has it’s weakness, following the trinity of water beats fire, etc.
Cards of same elements and number of stars can be combined to obtain up to 3 stars cards. Use the good combination of cards to beat your opponent.
The good news is that game has a guild system with multiple of features such as chat, guild expeditions, contribution and trade. The bad news is that your limited to chat with only the members of the guild.
In Champions Arena, the guild is where you can summon, upgrade, promote, reset your champions. It is also the place where you can perform trade with other players.
Trade is where you can obtain gems by selling your unwanted champions fragments, gears and resources. However you need paid gems to be able to trade. So basically F2p can’t trade for now.
You also need gems to summon, fortunately you can use free gems providing that you have earn some from doing guild missions and contributed enough so that your clan leader can share some with you.
As mentioned in the intro, Champions arena is complete 3D game with an unlimited mix of color for each champions.
Providing quite a unique roaster of champions, from elves, demons, robots and so much more. Some may notice some champions looks like Summoners War.
The 3D look like Overhit and Summoners War 2, a mix of cartoon and reality. Looks good for a younger audience, as some kid may see Disney like characters.
Summoners have skins, champions have aura but nothing really special that make Champions Arena noteworthy from other games in terms of graphic.
Upto now Champions arena feels like playing like a casual hybrid idle RPG, nothing impressive so far beside doing my daily quest and log off.
Champions Arena have 3 sound track, 1 for lobby, 1 for battle and 1 for estate. The music is not bad but repetitively listening to the same looping tracks gets old fast.
The voice acting for skill of each champion is nice but also gets boring after a while, so you would end up turning the sound off anyway.
I think this is the section that everyone probably wanted to read the most in this review about Champions Arena. I’ll be blunt, the Play to Earn is not for Free to Play. Why?
The only way to earn in Champions Arena is to win PVP match with a NFT champion. NFT champion can only be obtain either by buying them before the game launched or in the Opensea market.
A low rarity champion cost around $100, making the game immediately Pay to Earn. However you can also try to climb arena ranking to obtain an item that let you convert a normal champion to an NFT.
No matter how lucky you are, you won’t be able to compete against whale in the top ranking arena. So it’s a lost case for f2p to earn anything at all.
By the time you manage to rank and level you champions to try getting a better rank, the rewards would have already plummet down to pennies.
So as a F2P, the whole P2E is a big scam. There are other games where you can earn without any investment and actually earn something.
A very basic cash shop with multiple package of gems, summoning tickets, subscriptions, battle pass and resources. Price varies between $0.99 to $189.99 depending the packs.
Champions Arena clearly encourage P2W, with a battle that helps you progress faster is a big plus in the game including obtaining an epic champion and it’s fragments. Sorry F2P this game is not for you.
Note that the cash shop have some issue as many player reported that they didn’t obtain things they bought and had to go through the game support to retrieve them.
For now Champions Arena has no real end game content beside PVP and making all your 4 champions NFT. So that you can obtain the maximum reward for each match.
I doubt the developers will let the endgame stay like this and they may announces new features that would make the game more interesting.
The current log in events and summoning event is awful, log in to only obtain a reward is not an event at all.
If Gala fails to do any significant update in the future concerning the above, i think Champions Arena is doomed and will remain as a short lived experienced game with a honey trap named P2E.
Champions Arena is a complete waste of time, the game fails to deliver both as an idle rpg game and P2E game. While some may think i’m being harsh, i think it’s the proper respond to an hyped game developed by Gala.
I regret playing this game for 3 month, hoping something positive from it. But when compared to other game this game appear so mediocre and uninteresting.
You have so many better idle rpg with better rewards, events, illustrations and social interactions. Champions Arena may have been a hit 5 years ago but now it’s just outdated.
Imagine an idle rpg with no skip animation or battle today? No free in game currency? Let’s not forget the terrible rate of summoning champions.
Not mentioning the horrible P2E aspect of the game. It is sad to see such potential wasted by the greed of company making the game beautiful on the outside but terrible in the inside.
My advice to anyone that’s planning to play the game, just skip this one. You will thank me later as both Free to Play and Cash player. The game does not deserve a 4.2, meaning bots been doing their jobs.
Thank you for reading, please comment and share this review. I will see you next time in another review. Hopeful for a good game.
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Call of Dragons is a multiplayer fantasy mobile game, where you build city, level up heroes and artifact to fight against the Darkness. Compete and fight together with other player in an Real Time Strategy game with the latest graphics and new mechanics like the Behemoth…
Are you tired of outdated mobile RTS with archaic control system that limit your strategic gameplay. Or perhaps your looking for a fresh start in a game with the latest graphic? Well Call of Dragons is the newest release of FARLIGHT games, with a disney like approach characters of a fantasy worlds with behemoth waiting to be captured.
One of the most gorgeous graphic that 2023 can offer, Call of Dragons has stunning visual from the character design to the environment itself. Game looks very good from both PC and Mobile.
Another place where Call of Dragons excels is the sound and music, good background music and superb voice acting for the whole story.
Call of Dragons mechanics works similarly to his big brother “Rise of Kingdoms” but let’s say it’s has been simplified. Different Faction, heroes variety and also loads of artifacts, all of them are easy to upgrade and understand. However limiting one type of unit for one march make the game lose a strategic part of RTS. Behemoth is a nice and new addition that is fun to do with your alliance, fighting, capturing and summoning them never gets old.
Story is nice but the dialogues tends to a bit lengthy specially when you can’t skip them. You quickly lose interest in continuing the story line of Call of Dragons as things become unimportant and unrelated at some point.
Call of Dragons have a very slow progression. Either you will run out of resources or you will have to wait for days, weeks and even month. Limited energy is a bottleneck when your going to level your heroes and artifacts. Both of them resets every season makes it a real pain to re level everything again.
Call of Dragons suffers from the same problem of all Mobile RTS game, game balance! Don’t expect a fair fight, big spenders controls the game.
The events of Call of Dragons are the okay, not the best or the worst in the mobile games. Events are frequent but gets repetitive every single week or month. However the best rewards are only for the highest spenders because of a ranking system.
Let’s all agree that Call of Dragons is a pay to win game. High spenders control the pace of the game. Also you have no limit how much you can spend daily making it a whale fest.
Overall, the Call of Dragons has a good community and player support which create sense of community among players. By actively engaging with the community FARLIGHT delivers in terms of content specially the ads.
Being a bit over 4.5 GB, Call of Dragons is much lighter than it looks compared to other game of 2023. It also run great on both mobile and PC but occasionally lag from time to time.
On the other hand, the game is very P2W as there’s no barrier or cap that limit you from spending in game. Things get really ugly in some server with whale alliance bullying everyone around, making the game unplayable for low spenders and F2p players.
Overall, Call of Dragons is a good example of a good game with specs in all category but has terrible balance between F2P and P2W. Ruining the hard work into a greedy cash grabbing game in the mobile industry where player will drop in and drop out for a short period of time.
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The game features beast like waifu also known as kemono girls who will help you save your sister from a mysterious event. Your an “Awakener” who has the last hope of leading humanity. A classic story of an apocalyptic world where your the only saviour surrounded by waifu including some obvious fanservice.
Starting with an anime intro that sums up the main story where your greet by some fanservice right at the start. The game locks you in the tutorial mode for a long time. A practice that i’m not fond because it takes away all your freedom from exploring the game by yourself.
Combat is a turn base rpg where your character are chibi version of the original expression. You have 6 slot available for your waifus, 3 frontline and 3 backline. Despite those position where normally frontline would be hit first and then will be the backline. It doesn’t really matter as in Echocalypse each unit hits differently.
So try to read the description of skill of your units before building an SSR team that hits only frontline units. Tierlist will mislead you into obtaining specific units that are near good or bad as SR units without any awakening. Yes you will dupes and a lot of them including fragment.
This is part of the game where i feel the game is p2w . As you will be limited on the amount of currency once the beginner events are over. Also rates of summoning are not the best, don’t expect to pull 1 SSR in every 10 pull unless your very lucky. But that doesn’t mean you will be able to obtain the same SSR units.
As f2p best to focus with the starter units given to you by game, a mix of SR units with MC and 1 SSR unit. Easier to awaken and cheaper to upgrade than having a bunch of SSR units that will be stucks on zero star for a very long time. Talking about upgrades, Echocalypse has multiple way to power up a units.
You can level up, awaken and upgrade units after you reach a certain level. Plus you can equip them with badge(4 of them more exactly), extra gear and exclusive weapon which can also be upgraded in various way. Although things starting to getting confusing, the game manage to keep things clear with a good interface and explanation.
Each resources has it’s specific stage which make grinding quite easy. But some stage have limited chance per day and some require energy(stamina). Yes sadly Echocalypse is an energy base game with a static pool of energy which generate at an okay rate. Luckily the game gives you energy refill daily to let you grind a bit more.
Echocalypse has a large amount of daily quests which seems to get longer each time you unlock new modes. I honestly skip some of them because after some time, i feel annoyed just to do the quests. Reasons are that combat that can’t be skipped is boring to watch.
Some modes are only available at a limited time which i successfully miss nearly every day. If your stuck on stage time to grind stages for some days to break through. This gets boring very quickly as you literally don’t feel progressing at all, only thing that is changing is the enemy units compositions.
Late game, Echocalypse has not only a long list of daily quests but has also an affection system like Azurlane. Let’s say it covers the basic of giving gifts to obtain information and voice lines. The dormitory is an inferior version of Azurlane with little interaction of the chibi waifu in their room.
Overall i feel Echocalypse covers the basics in terms of gameplay, illustrations, affection system but does not exceed other big existing title like Azurlane or Epic 7. Don’t worry the Fanservice level is on par with them so you won’t be disappointed. Even the normal illustrations are very good despite skins are being exclusively for cash player.
Yes it’s worth playing, not the best gacha collection rpg i’ve played so far but Echocalypse has it’s own charms. Good illustrations, okay gameplay and it’s long list of daily quests. Although the game feels very p2w, i can say i didn’t meet any paywall during my play through. You can easily manage with the units given to you unless you want to be competitive in PVP.
Judging that some SSR character have no animation and that some modes with non skippable fights, Echocalyspe seems like a rush game with content added here and there to make the game look awesome. But the result seems more like an idle game with repetitive contents and boring fights. As always Thank you for reading till the end, i will see you in the next review.
About S-mobilegaming Reviews
Yes, the game is very free to play friendly as they reward you with quite a lot of SSR units early on. You don’t have any paywall but need to grind a lot and you will need to focus only on a team at a time.
Not really, beside the usual packages, battle pass and skins that are cash only. You will only accelerate your progression with money by getting dupes faster but you will still need to grind resources for upgrading your units.
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