Champions Arena Review 2023
Champions Arena Review 2023
What is Champions Arena?
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.
Champions Arena's Tutorial?
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:
- First Battle 1-1: Obtain 2 champion of 2 stars + Learn use and combine cards
- Second Battle 1-2: Obtain 1 champion of 3 stars + Add champion and use Card Match
- Third Battle 1-3: Obtain 1 Summoner Spell + Add a spell and use it during battle
- Obtain 1 champion of 4 stars + Learn to summon, claim idle rewards, leveling and equip champions
- Sixth Battle 1-6: Unlock Auto Battle
- Eight Battle 1-8: Unlock Mayhem (explore, mining, fight and plunder)
- Ninth Battle 1-9: Unlock X2 Speed
- Tenth Battle 1-10: Unlock Arena (PVP and P2E)
- Last Battle 2-5: Unlock Tower of Trial
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.
Game Overview
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.
Freebies and Welcome Gifts
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.
How is the Gameplay Mechanics of Champions Arena?
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.
Does Champions Arena has any Social Features?
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.
What Graphics and Art Style does Champions Arena use?
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.
Music and Soundtrack
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.
Is Champions Arena Play to Earn?
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.
Monetization and Cash Shop
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.
End Game and Future Prospects
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.
Final Verdict and App Store Ratings
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.
