THE REVIEWS Episode 71: Mobile Games 4 (Ad Games Part 1) (7th Anniversary Special)
Are the games shown in ads really that fascinating?
Advertisements.
They’re everywhere. In our phones, on our computers, on the streets, in the billboards placed on tall buildings, even in our television screens. Right in front of our eyes. You could say they’re a part of our lives.
Usually, these commercials promote stuff like products that can be used daily, delicious food and tasty drinks, movies, as well as games. That’s right, game companies like Microsoft, Activision, and Ubisoft all advertise their games through trailers and gameplay to try and entice players to buy their newest creations. They contain the most fascinating aspects of the games, of course, and some even have five-star reviews added in, although I don’t know if they’re real or not.
They can be really beneficial to companies if players decide to pick up their games from the advertisements and enjoy them, but the ads could be really annoying at times too. Imagine coming across the ad numerous times while watching TV or YouTube videos, especially when they’re unskippable. Like damn, I know you want people to buy your games, but don’t you think consumers would hate it when they can’t get rid of it after 5 seconds while the video they were watching is interrupted?
But what about mobile games? Do they have ads too?
Yes. Yes, they do. In fact, there’s a lot. Way too much, if I’m being honest.
Some of these companies…you already know them, and I’ve talked about them about a hundred times or more. Supercell, Plarium, Miniclip. Well known companies who have deceiving ads that either make the games look like they came down from the heavens only for the gameplay to suck stinky ass, or are irritating as fuck with shitty voice acting and an unskippable twenty-second watch. It’s crazy how these still exist.
However, I’ve shitted enough of the games that came from those companies. Today, I’m writing about a different breed of mobile games. The SOCIAL MEDIA AD games. These bunch of games are well-known for their misleading and fake ads that are posted EVERYWHERE on the Internet, from social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter (now known as X, but who calls it that anyway?) and video sharing websites like YouTube.
You know those “Only 1% of people can solve this”, or “I can’t beat this! Can you?”, or “The game plays like the fake ads”? I’m sure everyone has seen one of these at least once in their lives. These type of games are well known to be the most fakest, scummiest, boring forms of entertainment out there. The ads show a certain style of gameplay, but then when you download the real game, it’s totally different from what was shown to us. Here’s a very famous example: Evony.
You think it’s a puzzle game, right? That’s what you’d expect. Even the App Store page doubles it down and it makes you think that’s what you’re exactly getting.
Would you believe me if I said that the game is NOT what it advertises itself as, and is a whole ass different game instead?
What do you know? It’s a base-building game. Wow, totally accurate or similar to the ads I’ve seen online. Just like the fake ads, they said. Yeah, the company’s right. It is like the fake ads. It’s fuckin’ shitty.
To deceive your newcomers into downloading the game that is vastly different from the original source is some fucked-up shit. This is false advertising…right? As much as this sounds like a case that can be pursued, it can’t. Wanna know why?
Evony knew players love the ad aspect of the game, and it is technically illegal to promote something that is false, untrue, or in games terms, doesn’t exist. The roundabout way they did it was to add that ad part of the game…as a minigame. A scummy thing to do, but they’re not in the wrong at all.
Now, I could go over Evony and why the game’s pretty bland, but a lot of other YouTubers had gone through this game too, so I’m not gonna play it. Nonetheless, for my 7th anniversary, I have gathered 7 other ad games that are well-known currently from what I could find.
Don’t mind my wallpaper, by the way. Emitsun is cute. One of my oshis.
Anyways, I wanted to do a mobile games episode, and I had this idea for reviewing these ad games for quite some time now, so I thought why not actually play them since I’m pretty interested in them and then telling you readers my experience.
You know, all my Mobile Games episode numbers are always increasing by 20. Mobile Games 1 is Episode 11, Mobile Games 2 is Episode 31, Mobile Games 3 is Episode 51, and now this one is Episode 71. Just a fun fact.
Who knows, one of these games might get me engrossed, and I might start playing it for real. Will there be one that sticks out from the rest, or are all of them just disposable after a few minutes?
Let’s find out.
GAME 1: HERO WARS
Our first game of the day is Hero Wars. I think you might’ve seen one of the ads for this game before. It goes something like this.
Honestly, this game did not look that enticing for me, but I’ve seen countless variants of this ad, and in all of them, the player supposedly playing in it is stupid enough to pick the wrong target to attack.
You might think, “Noah, since this game looks pretty boring, and the person controlling the hero is a dumbass. Aren’t this enough to drive you away from the game?”. Well, all I can say is that humans just don’t work like that.
Usually, an advertisement like this has a very simple concept to it. It’s not some complicating scientific shit that needed the periodic table or some big brain to solve. It’s just the game of ‘the higher number wins the lower number’.
Take this screenshot I’ve taken from an Instagram ad for example. By anyone’s instinct, they would take the sword and the treasure chest before slaying all the monsters on the screen. However, in this ad, what the person in the ad would probably do is click on the treasure chest, then going straight to the enemy with the 8 on top.
Of course, the person watching it know that’s not how to win this game or advance to the next level. They’ll think ‘How is this hard? Why are people failing to even pass such a simple level?’ And then, they’ll get the urge to download the game to try it for themselves because they think they can pass the level with their thinking. That’s how these ad games get downloaded, and that’s how I got into this and some of the later games too.
Anyways, back to the topic, I played the game, and it’s pretty dull. I do appreciate though that the very first thing you get to do in the game is to play a level of what the ad actually looks like.
It then cuts to the campaign mode, which is the main game mode of the game. The storyline is simple to understand, but god damn is it dry as fuck. In true ad-game fashion, the gameplay in this mode is absolutely NOTHING like the ads shown to me.
It’s just like Disney Heroes: Battle Mode except the characters look uninspired as hell, the background seemed like it was taken from Epic Seven while turning it into an evening setting, and the gameplay feels tedious. Here’s pictures for reference.
I don’t know why, but Hero Wars made me feel like I was just mindlessly playing something without any purpose or goal. The graphics aren’t top-notch either, and the heroes look so plain, like they’re not meant to be strong. The battle and its mechanics were so monotonous that I didn’t even bother looking at it, and all I was doing was waiting for the battle to end. I’m not too sure if I can express that exact feeling into words, but I think you might understand if you’ve played the game before. I’d describe it as I’m just really unmotivated to play this game.
Besides the campaign mode, there’s the gate mode, where you get free coins and a new character upon completing a floor or something. Guess what the mode looks like?
That’s right, it is JUST like the ads now. So this is where they placed this aspect so that they don’t get sued for false advertising. Smart move, not gonna lie. It is the exact same thing as how you would play in the ads. What do you think happens after I completed a floor, and my team power is lower than the recommended for the next level?
If you guess ‘shoving a money offer in the player’s face’, then you’re right. There was no hesitation. The moment I clicked ‘Done’ on the results screen, it literally brought me to this pop up page.
Yeah, talk about shameless. Promoting these shady ass money deals to me at such an early stage of the game. You really need the money, don’t you? Because nobody is spending any money on your game, you’re that desperate to already offer me a deal. Unfortunately for these game developers, I won’t be buying anything.
Like any other relatively unknown games, they kept showing me more deals here and there, like this Beginner’s Bundle here. You’re telling me a character with this amount of gold and 100 chests is WORTH ALMOST FIFTY FIVE US DOLLARS?! So nice of you to give me a 80% discount, game. Real generous of you.
There’s another game mode that is located in the campaign mode. Depending on how many stars you get for each chapter, you can play these extra special stages.
You can get free character shards from this game mode too, so it’s good for building your team. This game mode, however, is different from the rest/ How so? You’ll know in a second.
Oh yeah. Remember this? It’s the ‘remove the metal bar’ game, with the complimentary gold and lava coming along with it. For those of you who don’t know, Hero Wars ads used to look like this before it became the number-beat-number thingy.
I’m surprised they managed to fit all their ad aspect-modes in their game. I gotta give it to them. Pretty creative with how they put it, but too bad it’s gets boring really fast since it’s kinda easy to solve most of them.
While I was playing in the campaign, I got stuck at a stage. Not because I couldn’t defeat the boss, but it’s because I couldn’t get three stars for it. In each stage, you can earn a maximum of three stars, which means all your heroes are alive. In this stage, however, my front hero ran out of health and died, so I got two stars.
For your information, I couldn’t choose if I wanted my heroes to be front, back, or middle in my team formation. They already did that for me based on the class each hero is, so I had no choice but to try once more. Every time my front hero dies, I restart the battle. I do that again. And again. And again, until I decided that was enough.
I removed my front hero and went into the battle with four heroes in the team. Guess what?
What the fuck, man?
Yeah, did you have play any game where the lesser people in your team, the lower your team power becomes, and the higher the chances of winning? That’s this game. This shit is so illogical I had to do a double take at the results screen. I can’t even believe that a four-man team can three-star a boss battle, while a full-man team can’t. And it’s not like I changed the whole ass team. I just removed one member and the problem is solved. What kinda backwards ass logic is this?
Like every other game in this genre, a character needs to be leveled up and equipped with weapons and armor. Their skills needed to be upgraded too. That’s all normal. You see all those equipment I don’t have? I need to farm them, and the game tells me where to find it.
They give me a list of locations on where I can find it, and if I were to reach that stage, they’d allow me to ‘Go for it!’. All seems pretty ordinary here, right? I want you to take a look at the line that starts with ‘1–5:’, and read that whole sentence.
‘1–5: Merchant Camp 0/3’
0/3. It means I have no more tries on that specific stage. Now, you might think, “Noah, it might just have meant that it’ll reset in a day. It might have a 24 hour cooldown, and then you can go back into the stage and play it again to farm for the equipment’.
You should be right. With many characters in the game needing the same equipment to enhance their stats, you need to farm for the equipment so that everyone can be loaded, so there might be a cooldown for stages. I’d understand that because maybe the game just wants to delay your progress so that you would come back to play the game daily.
Sad to say, that’s not what the developers had thought.
Once you used up all your available tries, it’s done. It’s gone. You can’t play it no more. Not unless you BUY FUCKIN’ TRIES. YEAH, YOU BUY TRIES. WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN I HAVE TO BUY TRIES?! IT’S THE CAMPAIGN MODE, NOT THE EVENT! And you can’t even buy tries unless you’re VIP level 2, which means you need to spend YOUR HARD EARNED CASH ON THIS FUCKING WORTHLESS USELESS ILLOGICAL GAME!
The developers saw a money-making method and they didn’t think twice before implementing it here. Bunch of greedy fucks looking for some money to make by restricting and restraining us players on campaign mode. THE MODE THAT IS THE MAIN AND MANDATORY FOR US TO PROGRESS IN THIS GODFORSAKEN GAME.
All the characters need equipment, and there’s a heck lot of characters in this game. Sometimes the equipment is also needed to craft a better equipment. If I run out of stages and tries to farm for the equipment, which I’m sure I can do it in a matter of days, there’s no other free way to get it. The only other way I can get the equipment is through SPENDING MONEY ON PACKS OR CURRENCY TO BUY IT. That’s like if I create a game, and I charge you money every single time you want to upgrade any of your characters. The developers are really down bad for money. They’re probably not doing that well, are they?
Here are the skins. They increase stats pretty drastically, but they come at a hefty price. I wouldn’t do this though. Even though there is a boost, I don’t think a skin is worth ten dollars. By the way, this is the SALE period. Each normal skin costs about forty five bucks. FORTY FIVE BUCKS. FOR A SKIN. Nothing can ever convince me these developers aren’t looking for a way to conduct some daylight robbery and get some extra money on the side.
This game, overall, is just a fuck fest. Mundane gameplay, plain-looking heroes with no standout features, money-grabbing, restricting me on something I was supposed to be able to do, and expensive in-app purchases. Recipe for a shitty ass game.
This game gets a D. For being a dick.
GAME 2: LAST WAR: SURVIVAL
For this next game, I’m sure almost everybody has seen or heard about this game before. It is one of the more prominent ad games, and it kinda started a revolution of a well-known game mechanic. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, take a look at this video I have right here.
Yeah, I had to post this video to Youtube because I can’t upload a video here. Anyways, I’m certain you’re familiar with this. The scrolling left and right, shooting at barrels or barriers that give you perks, and then crashing straight into the barrels or through the red barriers to lose troops. Most other games follow this game too. You can kinda say this game is one of the OGs of ad games.
Without further ado, let’s get into the game. Instantly, I’m greeted by this screen.
This does feel and look like the ads for the game. That’s a good start, but I want to know if it’s like Hero Wars, where their promoted game mode is only a side quest or something. I am then brought to this next screen, and I already knew what kind of game I’m getting myself into.
From these two screenshots, it is no surprise that this game is a building base game, just like our dear friend Evony. On the bright side, the graphics aren’t half-bad, and it’s actually pretty easy to understand how to build your own base.
However, there’s something really surprising that even I was astonished by it. The main game mode…the campaign…has the same game mode and mechanics like the ads depicted.
It’s pretty hard to believe at first, because I thought this game would’ve just scammed me and put a different game mode as its main like Hero Wars did. It acutally plays like the ads. These advertisements are not talking out of their asses, and they’re telling the truth. I’m not gonna lie, I did have a bit of fun at the start. The opponents weren’t too difficult, and the attacks look a little cool.
But as you’d expect, I got bored of it FAST. Gameplay is so repetitive, and the stages are just the same few variants every time. You don’t get to do anything other than move your characters left or right. Their story plot was pretty mundane too. Upgrading the base, defeating zombies, and levelling up characters. Rinse and repeat. The game has nothing much to offer in the first place anyways.
There was this one part in Campaign mode where after you defeat a boss, this shit happens.
First off, why does she look like she was created by A.I.? I can’t help but feel that the developers just put some prompts into the AI art program and this is the result.
In case you’re unsure of what the hell just happened, let me explain. The boss got angry, and somehow found the girl that was WITH the player and his team, tied her up with the bomb, and now we have to find four pliers to free her of this mess. Wow, what is this game? Dasmel distress rescue operation?
That’s not all. I’m sure you’re wondering where the pliers could be at so that we can save this woman. Well, I’ll tell you right now. It’s ALL OVER THE FUCKING PLACE!
When I calculated how many battles we need to do before getting all the pliers, it’s about 20 battles, a few upgrades on the town hall that takes a few minutes each upgrade, and lots of upgrading of your characters so that you can advance faster.
Now, 20 battles might not sound long, but the constant need to go back to upgrade stuff because it’s locked either due to the player needing to upgrade the town hall or the characters not being strong enough is a pain in the ass. To top it off, there is not a single change in the gameplay whatsoever. We’re talking about 20 battles of same simple, boring gameplay. I got so bored I almost fell asleep. To think that to progress in this game, I’m gonna have to do this over and over again makes me sigh.
And it’s not like upgrading the town hall or the base’s other facilities are a bad thing. They just take a lot of resources and time. Now, the resources can be earned back, so that’s not too much of an issue. It’s the TIME that’s the problem. The higher level you upgrade, the longer you have to wait. It can range from minutes to hours to even DAYS. You want to skip it? Of course you can. What kind of game doesn’t allow you to do that? You just need to spend your hard-earned cash on rubies, which are by the way EXPENSIVE AS FUCK, and use them just to speed things up so that you can CONTINUE PLAYING THE MAIN QUEST.
Also, this game kinda scammed my feelings. When I reached a point in campaign, they introduced me to this Ultra Rare character. Usually, when this game’s campaign introduces you to characters in the story, they give it to you for free. Guess what?
I needed to pay for the character to unlock her. Given that you showed me her unlock screen, I thought you were gonna give me this UR for free. What the fuck is this then? Asking me to spend money for this shit? Get the fuck outta here.
Afterwards, they throw me offers at random moments, usually when I log into the game. I understand this might be a marketing strategy, but I won’t buy into these type of things.
Overall, this game is by no means bad. I got to give it credit for actually following up on their promise. However, it is not as fun as they said to be. With the other mobile games I shitted on with repetitive gameplay like Mortal Kombat Mobile and Disney Heroes Battle Mode, at least they have characters I know and love, and that makes the efforts to upgrade them a bit more worthwhile. The fights are also mostly not the same because of each character’s own passive, and you can control a lot of them.
Last War is a completely standalone franchise with nothing to its name except their original characters. They each have their own powers too, but in gameplay, they don’t make that much of a difference because your team power and characters’ levels matter much more than each individual skill. I find myself just putting the highest rarity of the characters I have and just mindlessly swipe left and right. I don’t really care if they shoot lasers or gun bullets or even pyrotechnics. I’m not interested in them. I just want the game to be done so I can progress, and that’s the second problem here.
I need to defeat the Campaign stages to get stronger, and it doesn’t help that the gameplay is boring, I have to wait for upgrades of my buildings just to unlock stages of the game, and there are numerous stages to go through. It felt like it was endless. There’s more game modes too, but they all have the same exact gameplay. Most of all, the characters look pretty generic, like any other low budget game. When I’m playing this game, it didn’t feel like a game that’s refreshing and fun. It just seems more like a dull entertainment source that requires a lot of farming.
I couldn’t be bothered to progress further in the game. As soon as I saved Monica, I left the game. What I’ve seen and heard though is that there is a PVP mode, where other players can attack your base and cause you to lose POWER RATING. Imagine spending so much time and resources to upgrade your base, only for it to be destroyed by another player who has their parents’ credit card to assist them. That would be crazy, and unfortunately, it has happened a few times to other players.
I consider myself to be lucky that I stepped out of the game early, or I would’ve probably lost my mind too.
That’s it for now. I’ll review the rest of the games in Part 2 and 3, so keep a lookout for that.
As always, thank you for reading, and have a good day/night!
