[REVIEW] AFK Arena

 

Mobile games. Love ’em or hate ’em, they’re not going away any time soon. And sometimes, they’re even pretty decent, and unexpectedly so. A game doesn’t have to necessarily be groundbreaking in order to be good and fun, and that was what I found to be the case with AFK Arena.

KEEP IMPROVING EVEN WHEN YOU'RE AWAY

 
AFK Arena, published by Lilith Games and Original Entertainment, bills itself as an RPG, and I guess by technicalities that’s not really a lie. I tend to think of RPGs as having rich complex storylines, and it’s not like AFK Arena has no plot or lore to it, but like many mobile RPGs, its story and lore you can utterly ignore and you won’t really lose much in the way of gameplay. In a nutshell, the land of Esperia has been attacked by the Hypogeans, and it’s your job to collect heroes to fight back against the growing invasion menace.

There are loads of familiar RPG elements. Your heroes can be leveled up and grow in strength, they can have equipment, they have different skills that aid them in battle, and you can mix and match your team of 5 heroes until you have a group that best suits your playstyle. Some heroes are better than others, naturally, because that’s just the nature of the game, but I think there’s still a decent enough variety that most high-tier teams won’t look exactly the same as everyone else’s. Some prioritize strong or fast attacks, some are more defense-based, others have healing skills.

True to the game’s name, you keep earning money and experience even while you’re not playing, so you can put the game down and go about your daily life and come back later to accumulated rewards. Frankly, I think this is a fantastic thing, since it means that if you’re stuck in one area, not strong enough to continue at the moment, then you’re not consigned to a relentless grind in order to improve. You can just put the game down, come back in a few hours, or a day, or whenever, and have a bunch of experience ready and waiting so you can improve your team of heroes. 

 
You get heroes (in the form of cards, as seen in the above screenshot) by exchanging diamonds or friend points or scrolls, which you can earn by completing various tasks and challenges as you progress through the game. These rewards come pretty frequently at first, but slow down the further you go, as the tasks become harder to complete or simply take longer to acquire all of the experience and materials to grow strong enough to overcome. This also isn’t unheard of in freemium games, giving players a big hit of endorphins and rewards early to get them hooked on the game, but gradually taper off, to encourage them to either keep playing longer, or to spend real-world money on purchasing rewards and strength more quickly.

Common heroes can be sort of recycled — which they politely call “retiring” and not “feeding into an experience grinder”– to gain items and resources. Stronger heroes can be improved through spending experience, or by fusing them with clones of themselves in order to grow not only in strength but also potential, raising level and stat caps. And when I actually have to type those words, the whole concept seems really weird, but this is a common thing in card hero type games. Get clones, fuse them, get stronger things. It only seems weird if you think about it too much.

MAKING YOUR WAY ONWARD

 
Most of the game is about battles, your team of heroes against a team of enemies. And there is a lot of battling in this game! Story progress? Done by battling. Guild Hunts? They’re battles. Fighting in the area? Obvious battles! Going on quests to far-off lands in order to hunt down some rare rewards? You better believe that battles will be part of it. You’d think this would get repetitive and dull, but the battles are timed so they don’t go on forever, which is good. And there’s also the ability to speed things up, and to automatically use a hero’s special attack when they’ve built up enough energy, rather than using it manually. Sometimes it pays to do it manually so you can time some devastating chain attacks, but more often than not you can stick it on auto and just watch the battles play out before you for a minute and a half. It’s as involved as you want it to be.

I’m pretty fond of the battle variants you do in the Peaks of Time. They’re sort of side quests, with more being unlocked the further you progress through the main story. You battle increasingly stronger groups of enemies, and your own team doesn’t gain experience per se, but after each win, they gain a relic, which can increase stats, give bonuses to special abilities, or have area effects such as randomly hitting enemies for small amounts of damage. So you might not have any permanent stat increases from the venture, but your team is growing stronger thanks to the relics, and your choice of relics will affect how future battles play out. There are also substantial rewards to be gained through these side quests, such as large sums of money, new heroes, etc. I enjoy unlocking new ones and seeing how far I can go, trying different strategies with relics. It’s similar enough to regular battles that you don’t need to relearn anything, but different enough to provide a bit of a change of pace.

COOPERATION MAKES IT HAPPEN

 
Similar to many mobile games, there are also guilds to join, collections of players who might know each other, but honestly are probably just joining guilds with cool names and because the game rewards them for doing so. Since I got into the game thanks to watching Markiplier’s strange “movie trailer” for the game, I naturally had to join an Unus Annus guild, and as you can see from some of the player names, there are a lot of UA nerds out there. Which suits me just fine! It’s actually a guild with people I enjoy talking to, and that’s actually pretty rare for me when it comes to these sorts of games. Normally I just sit back and lurk in guilds or join one, claim rewards, and then go back to not belonging to a guild at all, but here, I actually feel like I’ve made a couple of acquaintances I enjoy interacting with. That probably has more to do with us being Unus Annus geeks than AFK Arena players, but hey, I’ll take it!

Being part of a guild gives you access to a guild store, and guilt hunting quests, both of which can get you some decent rewards after a time, even if you can only hunt so many times a day and it takes a little while for rewards to add up. But as I’ve said about many other aspects of this game, that’s par for the course, and far be it for me to hold an industry standard against a game.

 
I may have started playing this game because a gamer I respect recommended it, but I keep playing because at the end of the day, it’s a fun game. It may not be ground-breaking, but it doesn’t need to be. It may not be stunningly original, but it’s got some good writing and good graphics and even runs okay on my less-than-great phone. It’s got a lot going for it, with regular events, new heroes, and a solid fanbase that sticks around for the same reason I do. It’s a game that offers something while you’re playing it, and will keep offering something if you take a break and come back to it later. If you enjoy mobile games with solid RPG elements, and also games in which you can collect a roster of heroes, then consider giving AFK Arena a try. It’s free, it’s on Android and iOS, and really, what have you got to lose?

(You actually have plenty to gain if you use these redemption codes when you first start, since you can get a load of boosts really quickly and make game progression that much more fun!)