FINALSWORD MobileEdition

Good experience that has been well worth the $1.99 I spent on it. The story starts in a small village and you must find medicine to cure a sick patient. From there, you’ll explore a respectably big world, with interesting locales, great creature design, fun, challenging combat, sweet equipment, and enough conversation to make you feel special. The game is very light RPG...you have some dialog options, but everything is fairly linear, and there are not meaningful choices. That being said, the world design in enjoyable, and almost everyone has something to say so there is a surprising amount of immersion/enjoyment from being in the world. Stats are auto-allocated each level, and equipment is mostly as straightforward as each progressive town has better equipment to buy. However, the game is set up in such a way that the new equipment feels earned and satisfying, and necessary for the next encounter. Combat...this game is very challenging! But mostly in a skills based way- enemies all have attack patterns (bosses generally have more than one stage of attack style), and you will have to learn the patterns, and plan your attacks accordingly or they will wipe the floor with you. Because of this, as I mentioned earlier, the game can be very satisfying, and each level or equipment upgrade feels rewarding. Enemies spawn in zones constantly, so you might walk someplace where a wolf spawns, you’ll kill it, move to the next enemy, and in a few seconds (varies by zone and enemy), the wolf will spawn again. It’s a tad hokey, but mostly adds to the urgency of combat in a good way, and makes grinding (of which I have not had to do to much) simple. I’m playing the game in an iPhone SE, which the app does not recommend, but it’s worked fine outside of one or two locales that have stuttered. From a production values standpoint, “endearing” is the best word I can think of. It’s sort of like some college students decided to make a Dragon Age ARPG in Unity as a capstone product. Graphics are simple, but everything is well designed, equipment looks cool, and monster design and boss fights are on point. There are a few frustrations if you’re used to twitchy combat games, which this game is half of the way towards being- like switching from an attack to a block doesn’t happen as fast as I can think it, which feels clunky given how tight the pattern- based combat is, but once you start to learn it, it is very rewarding, and you can feel the hero’s progression. To the developers- thanks for a great game! One of my first thoughts playing it is that this is a great ARPG sandbox, and if you ever wanted to return to build a robust RPG leveling/choice mechanism and story on top of it it could truly be something special.