THE REVIEWS Episode 72: Mobile Games 4 (Ad Games Part 2) (7th Anniversary Special)
More of the ad games coming up…
Hello, I’m Noah, and welcome back to the Ad Games review.
Yesterday, I’ve written about two of the ad games, namely Hero Wars and Last War Survival Game. Both of them are pretty boring, pretty much unlike what the advertisements the developers posted on social media had shown us. One of them even tried to be a big cash grab by attempting to charge me for tries on the campaign stages, which is one of the scummiest moves in the gaming industry.
Today, I’ll be reviewing three more games from the seven ad games I have installed on my phone as part of my seventh anniversary on this platform. With that, let’s get straight into the review.
GAME 3: WHITEOUT SURVIVAL
When I first saw an ad for this game, I was kinda interested to try this game out. Any ads for this game usually involves one or two individuals who are freezing in the middle of the North Pole, it seems. What the heck are they even doing there in the first place? Anyways, one of them would go and punch a tree or something to get wood to build a campfire. Then, he and the other person would go punch more wood as the campfire upgrades, and so does the surrounding area as more buildings would be be built.
There are different variants, with minor story context differences, but mostly the same. A polar bear chases them, or they put a real life human having difficulty pushing boxes in winter settings, or America even gets frozen in the middle of a football match. What, you don’t believe me? Have a look.
I think their ads are pretty hilarious and crazy at the same time, and that’s one of the two reasons why I downloaded this game. Of course, the other one was because their ads keep appearing.
Starting this game, we have these four protagonists who are, what do you know, stuck in the middle of what looks like Antarctica. Why are these people randomly coming to freezing cold places and getting lost in them or something? Are they looking for a faster way to die?
Back to the game, they found an unbuilt base nearby. Wow, what a coincidence. Also, if you already didn’t know what this kind of game this is, this is a base building game, much like Last War Survival Game. After building the cookhouse and feeding them, our protagonist somehow has the power to feel that a snowstorm is coming, so everyone goes into the built shelters to take cover.
In a twist of events, old Bill succumbs and dies in the cold, harsh winter. The other three people found a note that Bill kept about constructing a safe home for everyone. Thus, they decide that they would honor Bill’s dying wish and build a secure base for survivors.
Like every base-building game, you have to use your resources to build different kinds of buildings. For this game’s instance, examples include a sawmill, coal mine, and iron mine. Like what their names suggest, they give you wood, coal, and iron, things you can use to further develop your ever-growing base.
For this game though, there’s different aspects to upgrading. You have to upgrade its equipments first before the facility itself. You also need to put survivors into these buildings for the latter to work and give you resources. Kinda like real life, if you ask me.
Similar to any and every base-building game, you need to upgrade the levels of the buildings too, and of course, they take time to upgrade. You can either choose to speed it up with a power-up or gems.
As you go on your journey, upgrading your base to be bigger and better, there will be more survivors coming into your base and seeking refuge. Most of them are fine, but there will be some that are not healthy. This is what the clinic is for, and you’ll get to build it after this. Having more survivors in your camp means you can assign more people to one building, and you can earn more resources.
Like a mayor or owner of the city, you have to take care of your survivors as well, and attend to their needs, which can be a bit troublesome. You can see who is unhappy about the base you built, and the reason for it through the suggestion board, and you can attempt to fix the issue too. You ungrateful survivor, stop fuckin’ complaining. Be glad I took you in and allowed you to live in my place for free. You would’ve been like old man Bill if it wasn’t for me.
Soon, you’ll hit your first biggest obstacle, which is another snowstorm. It’s pretty easy to reach the first requirement, because the game loves giving you free gifts, and they even reward you with high quantity of resources should you complete a mission, which includes gems. Wow, this game is very giving. For the second one, you just have to wait patiently. Not that hard.
This game also has another game mode called Exploration, and this is where the gacha part of this game comes in. This game mode require you to use a separate set of people you have to use. The survivors you gained? They only work in the base. So, where do you get these special set of heroes? Well, from what they call the ‘Hero Hall’.
You need keys, and strictly KEYS, to open boxes to get characters or materials. What can keys be bought with? Gems, and the keys don’t come in cheap either. The game gives you lots of gems so you can spend it on keys to summon characters. Did I say summon characters? Sorry, I mean CHANCE to earn characters.
Yes, you did not read wrong. You only have a CHANCE to get characters from the gacha. It is not guaranteed. Most of the time, they give you character shards instead, which is obviously not enough for you to unlock a character, so you have to spend a large amount of keys just to unlock a hero. I really despise these type of gacha games. At least give me a character or something. Dupe or not, at least it’s something more worth than FUCKIN’ SHARDS.
I did a 10-pull, and this was the rubbish I got.
A load of fuck, right? Like every single gacha game.
There are TWO types of gacha. One normal gacha, which is the one I did the 10-pull on and requires silver keys, and the advanced gacha which requires gold keys. The only difference between both of them is just the latter has a SSR character while the former doesn’t. A silver key costs 500 gems, while a gold key costs three times more. I love the fact that you can spend gems, thinking you could get a better character, only for you to get something you can obtain for free.
After ranting so much about this shitty gacha system, you’d be asking me ‘Noah, if you’re pissed about the gacha aspect, then you don’t need to play Exploration. I’m sure it doesn’t matter that much, right?”
Well, unfortunately, I can’t not play Exploration. Besides giving me EXP bottles to upgrade my Exploration heroes so that they can beat the future stages, they also give me steel. You might think steel isn’t that important, but it helps with the production of resources, and is even needed for future buildings to be built, including the clinic. So, I didn’t really have a choice.
I guess the game mode was fairly alright. It wasn’t too hard, but one of my characters keep dying. With the rates of this game’s gacha tough, I’ll most likely be stuck with these two characters for a very long time, and I’ll soon hit a roadblock where I can’t get pass a certain level. Tough, but there’s nothing I can do since I’m not willing to spend money on this.
After clearing this first snowstorm, and playing the game for a while more, I was informed by the game there would be another storm approaching, and I need to fulfil a new set of requirements again. That’s when I realized how this game functions. You upgrade your buildings to upgrade your furnace by completing missions and playing Exploration, which requires you to spend gems and money to get a character to help you get more resources to increase production rate, then get more survivors to produce more resources to fulfil the requirements for the upcoming snowstorm, and finally, you just rinse and repeat the whole process.
Whiteout Survival, like Last War Survival Game, is pretty boring and mundane, because you’re just doing the same things over and over again without feeling any sort of accomplishment because it’s just tapping and upgrading. If you don’t have enough produced resources, you can’t go fist fight a bear with your characters. You just gotta wait around until it reaches the supposed amount it needs. It makes me wanna sleep. I can’t even see how the food gets made or how it looks like, or the process of how survivors cut wood or get coal.
To top it off, you might need to spend actual money to get a better chance at obtaining characters for Exploration so you can increase the production rate and reduce the waiting time for gaining resources to prevent the snowstorm from shitting on your city. The graphics are pretty okay, but the designs of everything in this game are just dull as hell. There is an alliance future, so I think it could be like guild wars, but I was so bored with this game I just stopped playing after the second snowstorm is scheduled to come in. This game is probably a whiteout survival against those who actually spent lots of money on this game.
Overall, this game is worse than Last War Survival Game, but is still better than Hero Wars, because at least it doesn’t restrict me on the main game mode. Also, Whiteout does play like how the ad shows it to, so this game gets a pass from me.
GAME 4: GARDENSCAPES
Among all the ad-related games I’ve chosen to play, Gardenscapes has the least interesting advertisements I’ve seen. Most of them usually include some poor family getting destroyed because the ‘player’ doesn’t know how to play the game. They’re either getting frozen to death or their money gets flushed for the rich to become richer, probably breaking the economy or something. Poor people.
I’ve even heard pretty bad things about this game, like about how it was just a Candy Crush ripoff, and a boring one that. Because this IS a mobile game, you know I had to try it out.
Here, we meet our butler of this very new apartment we bought. This butler seemed to be really incompetent at his job though, considering he initially didn’t know that I was the new owner, and he even asked me to play a mini-game with him. What kind of butler is he if he didn’t even do some goddamn research on my particulars and how I look like? He even has the audacity to ask me to play a game with him WHILE I WAS AWAY FROM HERE, tell me IT WAS FUN, AND THEN ASK ME TO PLAY WITH YOU? WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? MY FRIEND? ARE YOU EVEN DOING YOUR JOB, MR. BUTLER? IS THIS WHAT A BUTLER IS SUPPOSED TO DO?!
On a serious note though, this is the mini-game. Seemed like it followed the ads. This is fairly easy, because there is a wall in the middle, so there is absolutely NO way you can even screw this up no matter what you do. However, you gotta consider this is the first level, so it’s only fair the game makes it winnable.
Our goal in this game is to restore our apartment and the space around it, decorating it with new furniture, while cleaning up the mess. Now, you might think this is like a base-building game. You’d probably earn coins from playing more levels and then buy the necessary materials or tools needed to build the stuff.
No. If that was how the game worked, it would’ve been way more interesting. Instead, this is how you restore an area.
You see the stars? They are used to help you do your tasks. Take it as you’re paying your butler to help you refurnish the place by paying him stars. How do you get stars? By playing the levels, of course.
There are two types of minigames in this game; one is the aforementioned pulling-the-lever game shown in the ads, and the other one is the Candy Crush ripoff. Let’s say Level 1 is the pulling-the-lever minigame. Level 2 would be the Candy Crush ripoff, and then they would alternate. Essentially, most of the odd-numbered levels are pulling-the-lever minigames, and most of the even-numbered levels are the Candy Crush ripoffs. Sometimes, they have the minigame of the same type two times in a row.
Let me be upfront; this is one of the most BORING games I’ve ever played. Period. All you do in this game is just follow what they exactly tell you to do. Play the game, get the stars, use it watch your servant do your work, repeat. It’s treating you like a baby, teaching you what to do each step of the way. Saying this game is for teenagers or adults is an insult. It’s more like a game that’s made for toddlers.
There’s literally nothing else to do besides the two minigames. You don’t even get to build anything either, because the butler does it for you. You swipe to match 3, you tap to remove the levers, and tap on the task bar. You just watch the butler do the fixing, the sweeping, and the restoration of your home. The fact that I can only do or control TWO things in the game is some bullshit. It’s like tightly restricting me in a game.
Sooner or later, the Candy Crush stages get harder and harder, and it’s not like they slowly increased the difficulty. They spiked the difficulty in an instant you’d think you’re like hundred levels in, when you’re just trying to fix the treehouse, the first few things you need to do in this god forsaken game.
I thought Last War Survival Game and Whiteout Survival are boring enough. Gardenscapes make them look like business class entertainment. I couldn’t even get past the first few minutes of the game before I just deleted the app. Austin, you may be friends with like everyone in the city and they might be your family or something, but I ain’t interested in that Dom Toretto shit you have going on.
Game 5: SOULS
I have been kinda looking forward to reviewing this game. I’ve seen some of my friends playing it, and I’ve gotten a little interested in it. Ads of it also kept popping up all over my social medias, especially my Intsagram, where they come up with these kind of promotions.
I’ve seen countless of companies where they promote their games online, and they place in codes to try and entice players to play their games with some sort of headstart. State Of Survival, Mobile Legends Adventure, Mafia City, and many, many others, but that’s for another day, and I might review those in the future mobile games reviews.
Anyways, back to SOULS, I decided that I wanted to try it for myself. I booted up the game on my phone, and immediately, the graphics caught my attention. This is some pretty good graphics. In fact, I think this is one of the best ones in the seven I’m reviewing.
This screen legitimately looks cool as fuck, not gonna lie. I don’t know why I felt this way, but it genuinely feels like the budget version of Genshin Impact. In terms of its graphics at least.
So, we meet this humbo jumbo named Sage Azuma, and he tasks me to set free heroes from the evil seven lords or something, and saying some shit like I’m the ‘chosen one’ or something. If anything, it reminded me of Shifu and Po from Kung Fu Panda, when the former told the latter that the panda was the ‘chosen one’ to be the Dragon Warrior.
It makes me feel like I’m embarking on a dangerous yet adventurous and eventful trip. A true hero’s journey. The game hasn’t even started, and I’m already all fired up. I can feel it, the characters are all gonna be having some cool skills, the storyline’s gonna have some of the most fantastic writing I’ve seen with epic fights, and the gameplay’s gonna be so astronomical it’s gonna blow my brains out…
Oh. Oooooooooooooh.
Yup, this is the gameplay for SOULS, ladies and gentlemen. No sugarcoating, no shitting, no whatsoever. It’s just a auto-play game where you deploy monsters and let it fight the enemies on its own. What an interesting game, am I right?
You can’t control your own characters, which includes but is not limited to skill activation, aiming a certain enemy to deal damage to, or even where they can be placed. It’s all decided by the game, which is a little bit of a bummer to me.
Onto the next point, I still think the graphics are pretty neat. The characters look goddamn impressive, and the music kinda slaps. The game is also very generous with rewards. In the beginning, at least. They give you ton of diamonds and summon crystals, as well as plenty of resources to upgrade your characters. I even went to redeem the codes and…
…it actually worked. Wow. The rewards, which I thought were at least one strong rarity character, just turned out to be 10 summon crystals, which doesn’t really guarantee me anything, but hey, free stuff. I would take it.
Some of the bosses have the best designs in the game too, like this wolf-lion monster on the screen. I’d say most of the skills executed by them are pretty good too.
This game has an exploration game mode too, and it gives you more free rewards, but sometimes you can come across a monster, in which you just have to deal the biggest amount of damage your team can dish out to get more rewards.
Like every other game I’ve reviewed thus far, this game mode also have stamina, or ‘torches’ as this game likes to call it. If you run out of them, you have to wait for them to regenerate so that you can continue exploring to get more rewards. The developers are pretty smart in putting a ‘plus’ button beside the countdown timer so that you’ll be tempted to spend some diamonds on replenishing the torches, or spend money to get the diamonds for it.
I have a few gripes with this game. Number one, the gameplay on the main campaign. I’m just sitting down, watching the fight unfold without being able to do anything. Those are the characters I own, man. At least let me choose who they attack or if I want to use their skill. What’s the point of calling it turn-based if I can’t even touch anything during the one time I want to do something, and should feel the need to? In fact, I get very confused because sometimes, I don’t know what turn I’m on due to the fact that everything is controlled by the AI. Lemme show you an example.
My characters have their skills ready, and they’re prepared to attack my opponents with it. The enemies marked with the right arrows are the ones I want my heroes to use their skills on, and the one marked with the black arrow is the one I don’t want my character to waste their skill on. But with the AI being the AI, of course they would us emy hero’s skill on the enemy that is about to die and can be knocked out with just a normal attack.
It’s pretty frustrating because the skill could’ve been used for an opponent with high health bars, and this becomes a recurring problem on the later stages, as the enemies become more tougher and stronger stat-wise. This shit caused me to lose sometimes, which is crazy because this situation really looks like those in the ad-related games where the player keeps failing at an easy level. I really wished they’d let us control my characters at the very minimum.
Number two, the upgrades cost a LOT of resources, like even at the lowest of levels. You might think Level 30–40 is not that low level anymore, and it is normal for the upgrading cost to be expensive. I understand, but how do you explain 5–6 thousand magic stones used for each level when you only get like 3 thousand per battle? Not only does the cost increase every level, you have more than 1 character to upgrade.
Let’s say you earn 3.5 thousand magic stones per battle, and you have five characters you want to level up from level 34 to 35. On that one level alone, you need 38500 of those stones. FOR ONE FUCKIN’ LEVEL. Even if we’re somewhat in mid-game, this is quite too much to ask for.
Number three, the events. Their missions are impossible to complete unless you take out the credit card from your wallet or your parents’ and swipe it to buy diamonds. I thought events are sort of a way to ease the player into playing the game more and making them stronger at the same time. Sure, it should have some difficult things, but at least half of it should be attainable for F2Ps so that their account can grow. Not for this game, though. This game said ‘fuck no’ to that tradition and decided to go all out to annihilate players.
WHO THE FUCKING HELL ON EARTH IS GONNA SUMMON 1000 HEROES?! IN A GODDAMN WEEK NO LESS? Each summon costs 300 diamonds, so 1000 times equals to 300 thousand diamonds. Wanna know how much is that? 10 thousand costs approximately 112 US dollars, so 300 thousand diamonds is estimated to cost around $3360 USD! THATS SOME HORSE ASS SHIT!
You see the 64 I did? Yeah, that’s with all the freebies that came along with my entry as a new player. You definitely won’t be getting that much summon crystals either, and the gems only come scarcely, not even in big amounts. Even if I were to cut this by half, 500 summons mean over a thousand bucks need to be spent, and I only can do about 1/5 of it in the period as an F2P. They really want you to spend money to get the best rewards, which is locked behind a difficult goal that seemed so reachable, yet is so impossible to achieve. You greedy fucks.
The other events include the dice-rolling ones, where you roll a dice to move your avatar across a board to get rewards. Once you step on a monster tile, you lose a reward. It can get pretty annoying at times, but it isn’t too big of a deal, considering this isn’t the main part of the game.
Last but not least, the app itself. It’s crazy that I have to even write about this because this shouldn’t even be a fuckin’ problem, but here we are. The app…crashes. Yup, you saw this sentence right. The game CRASHES upon starting. Have you ever heard of an app that is quite well-known to be this dysfunctional?
Even worse, sometimes the screen is just a blank ass space. It’s as if I’m seeing a reflection of myself on my phone. If I wanted a mirror, I would’ve just bought one. Why would I need a game that can’t even start up at times to see my face? You wanna know the worst part? This happens RANDOMLY without any warning for pattern. Sometimes, it’s 1/4 chance. Other times, it’s 1/5, 1/6, or just by chance.
This feels like I’m in a gacha game or something. The rates are something I should expect from rolling for my favorite characters in BanG Dream Girls Band Party, or Golden Freddy appearing in the posters in Five Nights At Freddy’s, not on a fucking boot-up of a mobile game.
This game really had a chance to be greater than the ads said. Such nice graphics, cool-looking characters with impressive-looking skills, and even music that sounded so good, only for the gameplay to be mindless, the harsh difficulty of upgrading your account, and its app troubles on starting up. There’s pros and cons, but the gameplay con outweighs the pros easily. A game that I lose because of something I can’t control is a game I cannot stand to play.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Whiteout Survival is better than this game. Simplicity is still better than a complicated, money-grabbing, onerous game.
So far, all five ad-related games I’ve reviewed didn’t really meet any of my expectations. In fact, none of them are in the slightest good. Each of them are bad in their own ways. Despite that, I hope the two games I review tomorrow are miles better. After all, they’re the two biggest ones among this pack of games, so I have the most expectations for them.
With that, please come back tomorrow for the last part of my 7th anniversary special. As usual, thank you all for taking the time to read, and have a good day/night ahead.
