Ark of War has become one of the staple MMOs in the Android and iOS market, due in part to a combination of a lack of competition, and some of the most heavy-handed advertising since the last time I tried to log into Photobucket.com. The former of which shows players a scene of an epic floating battleship war, where two ships sent floating craft after each other in an epic battle, being lead by two giant floating boats. In fact, take a look at the trailer to get a good picture of what I mean.
Looking at one of the most heavily advertised mobile game commercials of all time, it Should give you an idea of what many gamers - myself included- expected to see in this genre: A large, 3D, open world where two arks can send soldiers to meet in battle. A very game where you can watch flying spacecrafts shoot each other out of the sky.
Now contrast that trailer with what we got:
Looks very different, doesn't it?
Graphics
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The 2D graphics are great in this battle. Too bad you can't actually play it. |
Gameplay
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You will spend 90% of your time tapping things on this screen. |
If you were looking for the epic mid-air flying space ship battle the trailers on YouTube eluded to, keep looking, chief. This ain't it. The best you're going to get out of sending a fleet of troops to attack another ship is a pre-cooked animation of a ship slowly flying toward an opponent, and flying in a circle around it once it makes contact. You don't get to see the battle until after the generic circle flying animation is complete, and even then, you have to check your in-game inbox to see the pre-recorded outcome that looks like a turn-based RPG.
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This is as close to an epic battle as you're ever going to see. |
there are at least 10 or more currencies in game that must be balanced between different resources, and everything is a game of point and click management. It has that in common with games like Sim City 2000 and Farmville. You will never fly a ship, or see the inside of the bridge of your own craft.
it may not seem like a problem at first, till you realize this -coupled with a series of countdown timers- is basically the whole game. you gather resources, which takes literally hours, then you make upgrades to your ship and troops, which takes even longer.
In other words, this is a great video game, if you don't like playing actual video games. There are minigames, sure, like the time-space war, where you drag ships into each-other to create bigger ships, but that just ads another currency to the game you have to manage; this time, it's the one you use to heal injured troops. the ones you send to attack resources, and other players.
Presentation
not only that, but you can also attack giant worms and dragons in this game, and you get the same set of animations. Even when you hit the replay button, you get to see what actually happened -- watching the battle as it was actually meant to take place, but the dragon or worm is missing. Instead, you're attacking their army, and they mysteriously have a transport ship you can blow up.
So, basically, this game manages to add anything it wants, so long as it can just keep recycling the same artwork and animations for everything. I don't know about you, but this comes off as extremely lazy to me. This largely visual game expects players to just use their imaginations for elements it was too lazy to add to the game. Keep in mind that this game is on the Android and iOS market, not the Atari 2600. There is no excuse for this crap anymore. These developers could have added a worm or a dragon in place of a transport ship, at least in the replays, but I don't exactly know what I was expecting from a game that adds countdown timers in place of gameplay.
The catch
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Me discussing the core problem with the game, and how it is designed to force players into paying real money for a single microtransaction. |
This gotcha game is clever, because its less likely people will blame the game, but rather the other players, for the scam being hoisted on them. This means that if you're at work or something, you are going to get repeatedly gang-raped by ships that are at least 5 bridge-levels higher than yours. Once you get to at least bridge level 11 with your ship, it becomes practically impossible to gather enough resources to evolve without buying force shields with real money. You can leave the game for two hours, come back, only to find all your resources gone, and your entire army dead, at least 4 times a day on any given server.
Other notes:
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This is the absolute fewest notifications this game has ever sent in a 1 hour period, and it's already too many. |
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