Anyone else here playing this? This came out recently on mobile. I never played Clash Royale but this is very clearly Sega’s clone of that game. If you’ve never played either, the format is a bite sized (3-4 minute matches) RTS/competitive tower defense style game, where you create a “deck” of 8 units and spent resources to play them into lanes. You’re trying to destroy the enemy’s towers on their side of the field. It’s actually a pretty nice analog to games like Hearthstone and Shadowverse.
I can’t say exactly how similar the units are between Clash Royale and Revolve8, but I do know that Revolve8 gives hero units special skills and super moves, and that is at least unique to this game. But what I really love about the game is it’s personality. It’s got these really hip, humorous re-imaginings on fairy tale and literary characters and it’s all just really upbeat and good natures. The character designs themselves are really nice, colorful and elaborate, and the game’s writing just has a ton of character (gallery here or on the official site). It’s got a main story mode as wells as individual story modes for each character.
Red Riding Hood is an Instagram personality who turns the big bad wolf into her photographer.
These characters reminds me a lot of the character designs from Wonderland Wars, since those are also fairy tale characters but more horny (WLW is the Sega arcade MOBA which I have played a moderate amount of)
I don’t know, other than the art, it’s really hard for me to care about modern F2P mobile games. The best ones manage to grab my attention for maybe a month and then the magic wears off and I never think of them ever again, and I can’t imagine this would be up there. Sure is cute though.
Clash Royale is honestly terrifying for how good, how original, and how utterly unappealing I find it. It really is some miraculous bridge between a mass-market and esports that no one could find, and I could only look at it knowing I should know more about a game that would be important for years
I have a lot of respect for Supercell that I never would for a company like Zynga or King; they are directly responsible for raising art standards in Western mobile games to something tolerable, they always raise the quality bar in whatever they enter, and they tend to move the balance to the player’s favor, analogous to Blizzard and World of Warcraft next to older MMO’s.
not like when I played King’s Puzzle Bobble clone, immediately realized it had physics(!?) so balls would move after shooting, and buggy, non-deterministic physics at that. And realized it had likely made more money than all Puzzle Bobble games combined
If it wasn’t so transparently a money grab I’d probably still be playing it. The games are short and impactful, the tactics and builds are fun, but it gets really obvious further up the ladder that you need to spend money to get higher.
At a certain point all my units were multiple levels lower than any of the opponents I was facing; I would have had to spend money both on extra cards and on the currency you have to spend to upgrade those cards. It would have been months and months of grinding out free stuff to get passed the tier I was in, I think.
Yeah, that’s exactly what’s devious about it. For the first month I was climbing almost entirely due to skill. I learned matchups, messed with unit composition, had tactics for certain scenarios. I was regularly beating people with better units, until finally the stats of the units outpaced my ability to outplay them.
Yeah, the business model is explicitly “pay 2 win” as all the kids say, but somehow doesn’t really seemed to have affected me in all the hours I’ve played so far. Maybe all the whales rapidly shoot to the upper echelons of the match making so you don’t really have to worry about them until you’re gunning for the top rankings? Being within a couple of levels of each other hasn’t seemed to have been an issue for me so far. Unit balance seems to allow your active playing skills to trump a higher level unit’s stat advantage.
I’m under no illusion if I were to get high enough that would change, but casual matches let you dictate what levels all units spawn as so at least you can play balanced matches with friends.
But the actual mechanics, yeah, Clash Royale created something really ingenious. It feels like an action card game; the deck building nature of the game has made the unit balance revolve around counter play, with units designed explicitly around combatting a specific unit type or strategy. But there are enough active elements you control, with unit placement and time of placement, which influence the timing of a unit’s DPS and it’s ability to influence unit targeting and pull aggro, that there is an active skill element that can supercede a lot of the underlying stat balance. Revolve8 adds special abilities and super moves that give some additional strategy in there too.
But Revolve8 is clearly better than clash Royale because Clash Royale units look like garden gnomes and animate like an early 90s rts at low settings while Revolve 8 is anime. Princess Kaguya smacks you with the moon and summons UFOs, because she’s an alien. The Emperor (from the Emperor’s New Clothes) loves muscles and just wants everyone to love muscles as much as him. Karen from The Red Shoes was cursed to wear demonic shoes that make her dance forever, but she’s cool with it because she loves dancing.
I find Igarashi’s designs and concepts in this game really vibrant and endearing. Like, the entire conflict in the game is that your country’s size is dictated by how popular your tale is in the human world, and your popularity is influenced by whoever wins these once-per-century battles. Peter Pan walloped the competition last time, Neverland grew humongous, and now it’s politeness laws are cramping everyone’s style. Cinderella can’t speed through Neverland because of the speed limits, Red Riding Hood can’t take selfies there because magic causes her pictures to automatically blur the background since other people didn’t consent to having their pictures taken, and the Emperor is asked to wear clothes because his nudity is upsetting to others. So everyone starts making teams in an attempt to gang up on Peter Pan next time.
In his story you learn that he loves muscles and wants to walk around in his underwear so everyone can see them but his advisers tell him it’s upsetting to the public and plead with him to please start wearing clothes.
So you get the story about his advisers telling him of someone who can make great clothes, who then spins a tale of this fabric that’s beautiful but can’t be seen any anyone who’s a fool, and no one ever admits that they don’t see anything during the design process because they don’t want to out themselves as fools. The Emperor eventually realizes than none of them can see the clothes and so he holds his big parade to show off his new clothes to the world. No one is willing to admit they don’t see any clothes because they don’t want to be seen as fools, so the emperor gets to parade around in his underwear freely from then on.
The only people who confront him about being naked are the children, but they all find his muscles really cool and want to be like him when they grow up. And they all lived happily ever after. Then End.
