August 13, 2022

Grimlight Review 2022: a waste of good potential?

Grimlight is an RPG on mobile platform that have characters inspired from fairy tales, with the help of the Dreamstone, summon them to fight the Dreamless and the corrupt memories. The game had a bad launch and was rated poorly for some reason that we will cover in this review. Grab your seat and read about a game who had good potential of being a top game but wasted it’s chance.

What is the Story of Grimlight?

The world of Phantasia is filled with mystery and wonder but has been eroded away by the Dreamless, shadowy entities that seek to corrupt all living things and consume the world into the endless void. Even the Dominion lords who once defended the realms were corrupted and soon lost their reason and sanity. They are now mere shells of their former selves engulfed in madness and destruction. Only you, the Dreamer, can banish the darkness by calling upon heroes of legend through fragments of their past memories to save the world from endless ruin…

How is the Game play of Grimlight?

After a simple tutorial which will explain you the basic of fighting monsters. You will immediately jump into the story, the game transition between narration and combat stages. The combat consist of placing your heroes on a grid which has 12 space. You will also notice that you have limited amount of memory. Memory is the limit of how many unit you can place on the grid. Units will have different cost depending on there rarity.

Once you finish placing your units. You can start the wave, your units will move and attack the enemy depending on their class. Once you’ve finish all the enemy in wave 1, you will be given more memory so that you can place another unit or replace your current team with another. Note that your squad can only have 10 heroes at a time, so to be careful and balance your team with a mix of every class.

The process will be repeated again until you’ve cleared all the waves. In Story mode, once you cleared the main boss on the map, you will unlock the challenge mode. Those challenge are similar to the normal mode but have harder condition. For example, you lost 1% of your HP every seconds or the enemy have a shield, etc. You will need to clear a stage on normal first to be able to do the challenge mode.

Units

In this game heroes are the units that you summon with memories, those heroes have different stars and classes that differentiate them from each other. They also have an element which represent their strength and weakness. All units can equip gear and can awaken to level 70 if you have copies of that unit. Meaning all units are important in this game, the way of game play will largely depend on your play style and the heroes that you manage to obtain in your summon.

Here’s are the 6 classes currently available:

Guardian – Front line Tank
Mage – Aoe magic caster
Sage – Healer
Assassin – Flank and focus attacking the back line
Warrior – Bruiser, Off tank, Dps
Ranger – Range single target Dps

As mentioned above they will also have different element. So you will have the 5 elements, Light and Dark oppose each other. The other 3 elements are Fire, Water and Nature. Where Fire counter Nature, Nature counter Water and Water counter Fire.

Gear

Equipment is also important as they have stats that will help your hero perform better in combat. You only have 4 part of gear in Grimlight, the weapon, armor and 2 slot for accessories. They also come in different rarity from uncommon grey to golden legendary gear. The rarity are as follows, uncommon, rare, unique and legendary. Weird that they did not add a common gear which is normally the green one.

Gear can be upgraded in 2 different ways. First is level up which consist of feeding the gear with other gear to level up the gear to a higher level. Second is the refine, where you will need an exact copy of that gear to make the gear+1. You can refine a gear up to 5 times and you can limit break your gear to reach the next 10 level. Note that gear will have different set that give a specific bonus when you use them.

Decide what gear that you will need depending on what type of unit your going to use. For example don’t put stats like critical chance on your tank, instead try to put def% or Hp% as stats. Don’t forget to read what stats the units will be using before upgrading any gear. Resources are limited so don’t upgrade and maxed a rare gear, focus on unique and legendary if possible. As you will be using them during the whole game.

Other mode

As usual, here’s a brief description of thing that you will see in the game, that are important.

Story – Main campaign of Grimlight
Dungeons – Resource, equipment and Event Dungeons
Summons – Gacha where you obtain new units and equipment
Arena – PVP mode
Shop – Cash Shop
Adventurer’s Guild – A fail sim mode
Collection – All your heroes are listed here
Squad – Form a group of 10 hero before combat
Inventory – Every single item that you possess
Battle Pass – Self explanatory

How are the Graphic of Grimlight?

The game is entirely in 2D graphic, character are animated and background are static. The illustration of characters are very well drawn and it is one of the reason many people was attracted to this game. Each character looks cool and are unique to represent their fairy tale original in the classic story. The trailer was also breathtaking and this is why the game was having some hype. But sadly, it was another game that miniature everything during combat to a chibi version of the characters.

Yes, they do look cute but why change the art style to this? The adventurer’s guild also have the character in chibi version, they mindlessly walk in the room and can’t interact with any object. I didn’t find any purpose of putting character in the room as they don’t have an affection system. Anyway, in combat skill animation is meh! They don’t look great, so don’t expect anything spectacular as in other games.

Controls

The control are rather simple, you select a unit and place them on the 12 grid before combat. When combat start you will only need to tap the skill of the heroes when it’s ready and that’s about it. Repeat the same thing to complete the other waves. You can replace a unit during between the waves or change it’s position providing you have enough memory to use that unit. You heroes will automatically attack the enemies depending on their respective roles.

Sound & Music

It’s a nice instrumental music that you will hear for each section of the game. Each character does have multiple voice acting line and they do have a specific line when using their skills. They also have part of each chapter narrated in voice acting. However all the line are in Korean language and cannot be changed, so you will have to rely on the translation to understand unless you can understand Korean.

What is the Game Length of Grimlight?

Dailies takes only 5 min to complete and your out of the game. Seriously? Yes, as most of the time after completing the daily you will run out of stamina. How about the story? Well at the start of the game you will given a large amount of free stamina and will also level up your account quickly which will give you a free stamina refill. As combat only last 1 or 2 min, most of the time you will be reading the story between each stage. Of course you can skip and comeback later to read it. The game is rather short, you can complete it within 1 week or less if you have the stamina to grind the dungeons for resources.

Is Grimlight Free to play?

Although a good amount of freebies will be given to you early game, you will earn less and less in-game currency once you finish to clear the story. So you won’t be able to summon new units or get dupes easily later on. Stamina will be a real issue once you reach around Chapter 4 where you will need to start grinding resources to upgrade your units and equipment. Your account progression will slow down considerably.

Is Grimlight Pay to win?

Yes, Grimlight is P2W. The games encourage you to spend as it starve you with resources and stamina. There are limit way to obtain in-game currency which you need to summon. Summoning is a must as you will need copy of a unit to awaken the unit. Cash player will be able to buy skins, battle pass and many advantageous package compare to a F2P. Which means a much smoother account progression.

No ads.

Microtransaction

The cash shop is the same as a typical mobile game. Monthly subscription, Battle Pass, in-game currency packages, daily, weekly, monthly packages and skins tickets. The price will vary between $0.99 to $99.99, although some packages price are a bit weird like the monthly card cost around $3.77. As usual be careful when spending as some packages are not worth.

What is the Life span of Grimlight?

At the current state of Grimlight, i don’t have a positive view of game making it through this year. They had a terrible launched which made many potential player leave the game without even trying. Having a too simple game play made even more player lose interest quickly and the stamina issue that you face later make the game even worst. Either the company decide to add more content or fix the stamina issue. Else this game will die.

Benefits

Reading text conversation may help your English a bit. The strategy part of the game may help some beginners to understand different role and position of a unit.

Community

Official link

Twitter

Facebook

Suggestions

Stop the use of stamina for dungeons
Lower the cost of stamina for stages
Add other way to obtain in-game currency
Better way to obtain equipment
Let you reset a character to obtain resources
Revamp the daily reward
Lower the cost of summoning
Let you move a unit position during combat
Add more content in Adventurer’s guild
Let your heroes interact with objects in Adventurer’s guild
Lower the cost in the shop
Add more achievement to unlock story and obtain more resources
Put events on weekend that lower stamina cost for dungeons

Updates

So far I’ve seen they have been adding at least 2 heroes in 1 month and rotate banners every 2 week for summons.

Should you play Grimlight?

I honestly think it’s a No. Grimlight is a real disappointment for an RPG in 2022. The game is not fun as you will have most the time be waiting for stamina to refill to progress or grind resources to upgrade your characters. I felt like playing an idle game, maybe they would have better chance as an idle game as the game play was way too simple for an RPG. Progression is really slow and you get more and more frustrated as the power of the enemy spike around Chapter 4.

Only way to overcome this difficulty is to farm resources and upgrade your units and equipment but guess what!? You will run out of gold or experience crystal or hammer to make the upgrades. Too bad you can only do 6 runs of one of those dungeon per day as your stamina is so limited. Another annoying issue is that you can’t reset a character, once you invested in a unit your resources are gone forever. Oh No! Chapter 5 have the enemy now is the opposite element.

Which means you will have a really hard time in this chapter unless you can train some units that are strong against that element. Good luck farming resources to level up that unit to the same level as your current team. As you can see, i had a real bad experience with this game but this may be different for you. I think this game is for someone looking for a simple RPG game where you play only around 5 min per day. Thank you for reading till the end, i will see you in the next review.