THE REVIEWS Episode 73: Mobile Games 4 (Ad Games Part 3) (7th Anniversary Special)

Two of the biggest ad games, how do they fare?

Hey, I’m Noah, and welcome back to the last part of the Ad Games reviews.

Finally, I’m left with two games to play. Seven games is a lot to go through, and most aren’t even high budget games at all like those in the consoles. The first five were even some of the most mundane and unreasonable mobile games I’ve seen. At least games like CSR Racing 2 and Disney Heroes Battle Mode have some enticing gameplay and good graphics to come with it.

These next two games are ones that are pretty renown for their ads. I won’t go too deep in the beginning, so that I can speak about it more later. Let’s jump straight into the first game we’re reviewing today. And that is…

GAME #6: AFK Journey

I’ve heard WAY TOO MUCH about this game. It was so excessive, and it was everywhere. Social media, YouTube ads, and even endorsements. This was like Raid Shadow Legends all over again. Content creators were promoting it like it was their own product. Matter of fact, most of them even praised it for being so innovative and fun, like it was the best mobile game of 2024 with NO DEBATE.

Now, you might think these ‘content creators’ might be quite small. You know, maybe those not relatively well-known like those under a million subscribers. Well, you might be in for a surprise. A lot of Hoyoverse (also known as Mihoyo) YouTubers have been sponsored to play the game. Mtashed made a channel specifically for AFK Journey, which was pretty surprising. You wanna know the icing on the cake? MARKIPLIER PLAYS THIS GAME TOO.

Yeah, one of the most famous YouTubers on the platform, the guy who is the director of upcoming film Iron Lung, and the man with 36.8 million subscribers, is promoting the game. He even has a whole video on it.

You know I had to include this on my ad-related games review. There was no way I’m leaving it out, especially not after big YouTubers were telling me this is THE mobile game of 2024.

The starting screen do look like a Genshin Impact clone, just like how SOULS did. Man, I don’t know why I keep associating games with Genshin. Probably because it was the one of the very few open-world games I played where I can move my character around worlds and explore cities. Sorry, Breath of the Wild fans, I don’t play Zelda.

Also, CRIWARE’s involved in this? Damn. The graphics must be super good then.

Let me tell you, my breath was taken away during its cinematic intro. Like damn, where did all the budget come from? They look stunningly amazing. It’s like I’m watching a movie. I’m impressed.

So, you play this mage named Merlin, who is said to be legendary with his powers, but he forgets his memories every once in a while. Hey, doesn’t this sound familiar? Ah yes, Thena from my ‘favorite’ Marvel movie Eternals.

Surprisingly, unlike SOULS, this game actually feels better to play and its looks do not deceive. You can control your character around and collect treasures, while defeating enemies and talking to NPCs. Pretty cool thing. Also, there are rewards for exploration, so you make sure to explore every inch of this map.

Of course, its main gameplay is just like Last War and Whiteout Survival. You place your characters in the formation, and they fight for you. You can either leave it on auto, or manual in which you can activate any of their skills any time you want. As the title states, you most probably just wanna leave it on auto while you AFK.

There is the gacha aspect in this game, and it’s normal for games to have these too. AFK Journey’s one though is pretty lenient though. There’s guaranteed within such a short amount of pulls, and they do give some tickets and gems for you to use it on this. Be it from mail, pre-registering, and even quests, as well as the campaign.

Back to the gameplay, in any and every battle you do, you get a few spots for you to place your five characters at. Now, you might think ‘I could just place my characters randomly and they might win’. Of course you can just do that, but there might be a difference on where you put a character of a specific class at. That’s because this game has the class advantage-disadvantage kind of mechanic, where a class deals more damage towards another while receiving more damage from the other.

You can win each battle, not necessarily by having higher team power than your opponent. You can also be the victor of the match by coming up with strategies and placing your heroes at the spot that might suit them the best due to the advantages in damage they’d be getting. However, I’m just that lazy and I don’t do that. I just assign my characters a random spot and let them fight.

As with every other game, there are many different game modes in this game too. Although I have not unlocked everything in the game, I don’t think it really matters that much because it seems to me they’re more like end-game content, so they don’t matter much in my opinion.

The first game mode that gets introduced to us is the AFK stage. This mode is just like the main campaign. You fight enemies, but by advancing further, the higher the quantity of idle rewards you obtain.

Basically, this is how the mode works. You can claim a chest of rewards every few hours, which includes resources to upgrade your character. The further your progress, the more resources you earn. It’s a pretty useful feature, to be honest.

The Dream Realm is just a game mode where you fight bosses and earn rewards based on how much health the boss has left after you attacked them. You get currency from this to exchange for A-Class heroes so you can fuse them to make them stronger.

Arena is like what you’d expect. PvP. Honor Deal is just another special type of PvP, where there are a certain set of rules to follow. I didn’t play much of it because I wasn’t particularly interested in it.

About the main campaign, you go through the storyline alongside some companions and solve some mysteries, all the while defeating monsters you encounter along the way. I think that even though the story writing here isn’t the best, I think it’s still pretty decent.

At times, I was intrigued on what was gonna happen next, like who the actual antagonist of the chapter was, or who this character truly is. At other times, I was pretty bored because sometimes, all these people do is yap complete and utter nonsense that you could technically disregard them and just skip the conversation altogether, which brings me to my next point.

Skipping the story in a game usually means three things. Either you don’t give two shits about the plot and just want to play the game, you want to get rewards that are locked behind completing a certain chapter which requires you to skip parts of the story, or you accidentally pressed the skip button and unfortunately miss the whole story.

This game does not want you to miss any part of the story. Each time you attempt to skip a part of it, they’ll ask you if you want it or not, and they even provide a summary of the part you are about to skip. I think this is pretty convenient for those who wants to advance faster in the game and wanting to know the story plot at the same time. It is a neat feature, I got to say. The only downside to this is that you won’t get a summary of those cinematic cutscenes if you try to skip it.

However, my favorite aspect of the game is the Resonance Level. Oh boy, this thing is a lifesaver. Literally and figuratively. What is the Resonance Level, you ask? Well, its level is based on the character in your team with the lowest level. This might not seem like a big deal, but just you wait ’til I reveal what it actually does.

Do you see the rest of the characters sitting in my collection? Do you look at their levels and wonder ‘How are they all Level 36? Did Noah really upgrade them all to Level 36?” The answer is very simple.

No.

That’s when the Resonance Level steps in. They take the lowest level of the hero in my formation and applies it to everyone in the resonating hall, or in other words, my collection. I repeat, EVERY. SINGLE. CHARACTER. That in itself is so goddamn broken. That just means I have to only upgrade the heroes in my team, and the levels of the characters in my collection will update accordingly. I’ve never seen a game before with this kind of mechanic, but I’m loving it.

Overall, this game may not be one of the best mobile games of the year or of all time, but this is a darn good game. The plot is alright, but the graphics, the animation, and the mechanics of this game are what drew me into continuously playing this game. Even on the gacha aspects, yes, there are paid bundles for you to buy to upgrade your account, but I have never ever felt the need to do so. The game constantly gives me rewards either from logging in the game or just playing it. They don’t shove deals right in your face either.

You can slowly progress and you’ll still be pretty decent at the game. All you need to do is to play and wait for the chest to give rewards, and then play and wait again, then rinse and repeat. It can be a little repetitive and annoying at times, but the rewards you get are worth it.

The game is not too simple, yet not too complicated to the point you wanna pull your hairs out like what Hero Wars or Gardenscapes can do to you. You just have to let it auto-play for you so that the AI can do the work for you so that you can attend to other things. If it fails, just upgrade your characters. If the opponents prove to be too strong, just come back the next day and claim the resources from the chest and upgrade your characters more. You’ll eventually beat it in a day or two. It’ll surely get tedious at times, but you get free rewards from logging in, so I don’t really see why I should keep trying to defeat a difficult enemy in one day when I can get more stuff in the next few days, which will make it easier for me.

The music in this game is nice to listen to too, and the best thing is this game doesn’t really need you to sit down 8 hours every day on a chair just to grind it. You can play it for any duration and just leave afterwards to live on the rest of the day.

I don’t know why, but I just clicked really well with this game. Maybe it’s because of all the shitty ass ad-related games I’ve played earlier, which made me appreciate what AFK Journey has to offer. Out of the seven games, this is the game I think I would stick to playing for a few more months. I really thought the ads by those YouTubers promoting this game with positive reviews are just a sham like the rest of these type of game ads, but I was proven wrong this time. This game gets a pass from me.

And now, onto the final game, the finale of this three-part review…

GAME #7: The Grand Mafia

When it comes to this game, oh wow, I can’t express it in words how funny and stupid their ads are. This game is one of the first few to hit the market with their ads plastered all over the internet. I felt there has been an oversaturation of TGM’s ads, even up ’til today. I’m sure everyone has seen at least one ad from them before. This is no exaggeration, believe me. I’ll show you an example of their ad, and all of them have the same premise and gameplay.

Ah yes, it’s the ‘crook-and-wife-gets-harassed-by-some-gangster-and-wife-leaves-crook-for-money-so-angry-crook-gets-rich-and-tortures-the-gangster-and-ex-wife’ kind of storyline. The kind that makes you wanna sleep after seeing so many of.

This game has been criticized and tarnsihed by netizens and critics, stating that the game is nothing like what the ads had depicted. Naturally, I got curious, and decided to download the game so that I could play it and see it for myself before making a judgement.

This could go two ways; either the gameplay is like the ad, or it isn’t.

We start with these two people; a high-ranking official and his son, who had just returned home after fifteen years of training in the military. The animation’s fine, and the voice acting’s okay too, I guess, but the looks on the characters’ faces are almost the same, like they never changed. The developers probably invested all their money into the backgrounds and animations that they didn’t have any more money to add emotions to the characters.

Anyways, this official believes in the law, and states that a person named Sellitto and his crew owns half the city. Blah blah blah, corruption, money laundering, ruling cities. Sounds like a normal mafia story. And then…

As the official rushes to help a woman who was almost sexually assaulted, she shoots him in the heart and he dies on the spot. Wow, dramatic, eh? Gotta have this plot point so that the protagonist has a reason to turn into a GRAND MAFIA, am I right?

They even give you an option whether you want to kill the woman or spare her. Either way, it brings you to the opening title card, sort of like how a movie is played out. You meet some people in the cemetery while you pay last respects to your father, and then you come across others who want to kill you.

For this, you just have to aim the scope at the three men, and you’re done. Afterwards, this woman by the name of Rebecca, who is helping you because her father was also killed by Sellitto, tells you you need to upgrade your mansion. That was when I knew what kind of game this is.

Base-building.

Not again, man. How many of these budget-ass base-building games are there? They don’t even look that great. What’s even worse is that this game tricked and scammed me, making me think I was playing a sniper game or a point-and-click game only for it to be fucking BASE-BUILDING! Phantix Games, you didn’t just mislead players with your ads, you bamboozled everyone else with the game.

Back to the actual gameplay, you need to do quite a lot of stuff. First, you need to upgrade the city constantly, which also includes your mansion. Your mansion is sort of the main hub, in which you can’t upgrade anything else if your mansion is under-levelled. You build buildings too to get more resources, but that’s pretty much the majority of the game. Build, upgrade, build, upgrade, build, and upgrade. Nothing more, a lot more less.

Of course, if you know these base-building games by now, you are aware that upgrades take time to finish, and as usual, they tempt you to use your boosts that they give quite scarcely or the gold, which is the premium currency in this game. So far, this game is proving to me how dull it is.

You also have to train troops for the fights, in which you just see them fight. No, you can’t do anything. You can’t control a sniper to aim at your opponent, you can’t control a troop of yours to do a fist fight, and you certainly can’t tell your people what to do or how to attack in the battle. I have more fun leaving food crumbs on the floor and seeing the ants flock to them. There is more entertainment from watching the sun set and rise than to play this game.

As the story progresses, the plot gets pretty stale, and boy, the animation becomes worse. It looks as if they were stuck on a time frame or something. Clunky animation along with awkward viewpoints, and the faces somehow looked worse than before. Just take a look at the guy on the most right.

And yeah, see the subtitles there? Not what I placed in, by the way. This game has lots of cussing. It is kinda normal though to see dialogues like these in games such as Grand Theft Auto, so I guess this mafia game is just trying to let us feel like we’re in an actual mafia game by sprinkling some vulgarities and gangster lingo here and there.

I wish there are more game modes to bring me way from this variety-lacking base-building piece of shit, but there isn’t, unforutnately. The last part of this game I’m gonna be talking about is the partner feature, and the date function that comes along with it.

You get introduced to a girl, who becomes your secretary or partner, and then you do some missions or play some games with her to increase your affinity with her and get her to wear some scandalous outfits. I’m not gonna lie to you, I was a bit interested in the dating part, because I heard this game allows you to date a woman, and it seems that the rumors are true.

Unfortunately, it is not available to me at this time, because the mansion needs to be at level 15 before it gets unlocked, which means I have to play a ton of this game to progress in order for me to unlock that feature. And let me tell you, I can’t be bothered playing more of this shitty game.

The Grand Mafia is supposed to be a game where you play as a mafia boss and feel cool about taking over turfs and becoming a city overlord, but instead it made me feel like I was a daily 9–5 office worker who is just sick and tired of his own work. All I do is build and upgrade buildings, wait for the upgrade time, and carry out everything else with a tap, including the fights.

What good can a game be when its only functions are tapping and waiting? Look at Harry Potter Hogwarts Mystery, a good example. I get it that I’m the boss and I’m acting as the person who oversees, but it’s so goddamn boring because there’s nothing interesting going on in the fight and there’s nothing I can do at all. This game even loves to shove microtransactions and money deals right in my face at any chance it gets. I know you want people to spend money in your game, but doing this just makes me wanna delete the game.

The graphics in this game is pale by comparison to Last War Survival Game, and that’s saying a lot. The animation in those cinematic cutscenes were also pretty bad, and this game seems to rely on sexy outfits in order to keep their player base. I’ll be honest, even if the women in the game have the sexiest outfits, it wouldn’t help much if the game is just a monotonous clutterfuck.

The Grand Mafia is only grand at being a sham, and that’s what it’ll always be. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. A bad game under the disguise of entertainment.

And that’s a wrap. Seven ad-related games reviewed. I’ve realized one thing after taking the time to go through each of them. Most of these games don’t usually follow what they advertised, all because they wanna try to bring in as many players as possible to their games, hoping they would enjoy the game and even spend money in it. Nevertheless, in almost all of these cases, they fail to make a name for themselves because they were already lying to the players who tried their game out.

In this industry, nothing is more important than trust. The trailers for the upcoming games the big companies like Ubisoft, Activision, or Sony put out always show the best parts about the game, but it is all about the trust the players will put in towards these companies that make a difference in sales and reception.

Ever wondered why franchises like Call Of Duty, Tetris, or Pokemon are pretty successful? Because the games deliver on their promises. Sure, not all of those games are of top-notch standards, and there are flaws here and there, but their games are at least enjoyable, be it due to its wonderful gameplay, amazing graphics, or its fascinating story plots. Most importantly, they all play the way the trailers showed them. No lying or deception needed.

It’s the same for any kind of media too. If a movie shows a good trailer but a bad movie, then people wouldn’t trust the director to make any good movies again. Right, Michael Bay? Skibidi Toilet movie? Really?

Anyways, all I’m trying to say is that if you want to create a movie or game that would make the audiences or players enjoy, then spend some time and effort to actually develop the game with quality. No one’s rushing you, neither is anyone forcing you. That way, you’ll have a great trailer that supports your fantastic game, right?

Because if you only put in half the effort to create a game or movie, then you’ll likely get half the good reception, or even worse, you’ll get all the bad reviews.

After all, everyone only wants to play a good game or watch a good movie, right?

Author’s Note

It’s been seven whole years since I’ve started reviewing media. From doing quite short ones to long-form pieces, from movies to games. I really loved reviewing for some reason. Maybe it’s because I could share my opinion of a certain media that I am enraged about, or something that is so good to me I want to share it with the world.

Over these two thousand, five hundred, and fifty five days, I have constantly find ways to better myself and enhance on my writing, hoping to be able to express more of myself through these reviews. Although I think that I’ve improved quite a lot, there is still a long way to go for me. Learning never stops at any point of time.

I am forever grateful to the readers like you who take time out of your day to read my reviews. No amount of words can express how thankful I am to you guys. Your reads on my works made me happy. I hope you enjoy reading my reviews as much as I enjoy making them.

As for my plans in the future, I’m definitely not gonna stop reviewing in the foreseeable future. It’s the next best feeling after writing my fanfics. Also, I have a MY THOUGHTS ABOUT episode posting soon after this, and it’s even voiced. On YouTube, at least. Look forward to that.

Once again, thank you for all the support throughout the years. I really appreciate it, and I’ll continue to try my hardest to be the best version of myself.

As always, thank you for reading, and have a good day/night.