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Saturday, October 16, 2021

EZPZ Saga

 



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The mechanical troops march up with: EZPZ Saga


The game that I will be reviewing today is a semi-clone of AFK Arena. This game suffers from the exact same problems as AFK Areana and that you have random gotcha pulls for troops and you get a flood of unusable commmon troops that drain away your storage space. I had high hopes for this game but I was instantly put off by the burnout I sufferred from these kind of games.


When you you start up the game, you are given several troops as a start.You must then let them fight idly to level or you click on the attack to take on the level's boss. You have to do this every time to progress as I did not see any form of auto-advanced for this part of the game.


The game also features a season pass that has one set of free rewards and then paid rewards. Not only do you have this paid content, you also have several more microtransactions you can pay to progress more. This game is very much pay to win and just has many systems to drain money from you.


Back on the main screen when you click on the scroll in the top right of the screen you get this menu with several places to go and collect diffrent things including the previous screenshot with the season pass. Some of these screens I cover in the following screen shots, but there is a lot of hidden little rewards you have to find and scout for. These screenshots will be a bit all over the place as this game is very chaotic and it is very complicated to figure out what to do.


Another set of daily to weekly quests can be completed to earn varius rewards. These appear to be temporary quests for new players to do as a kind of catchup mechanic.



Another random timed even can be done to unlock a rare unit to help power up your team. These missions are very difficult as it requires many gotcha spins to complete them. I feel this is another poor attempt to force players to pay money just to get a possibly useful troop, but by the time you finish getting the required gotcha pulls you may have better troops anyways, making this quest feel quite useless.


Next Is the daily tasks that you can do to get the premium currency of these blue diamonds. I have not played long enough to see what these premium currencies can be used for beyond buying more spaces for troops.


We finally make it to the main screen. You can see a constant chat window that can not be closed off. In the middle of the screen you can watch the idle battle going on while you sit back and do nothing but wait. Right now the textbox in the top middle is covering up the button you have to click on to advance to a new area after taking on the area boss.


You click on the the player picture in the top left and you can see various options in the game. You can also change the music that is playing during the idle screen. This is the most unique thing I've seen done in any of the games.


Moving along when you click on the Line-up button on the bottom of the screen you can choose which troops to use and change thier battle positions. The problem with this game is every once in a while the enemies force you to change the positions as they can sometimes attack the back row first.



You can then click over to the charachter button you can focus on upgrading several aspects of your troops. Now the first troop you get is the main 'hero' and has additional buffs that you can train as you slowly level up the main account. There is many things you can power up here as well as attacks or stats.


Here is the list of the talents you can unlock. as you can see there there are several tabs at the bottom of this box that you can put points into. There is a lot here to decide and plan on as you progress through the game.


Here you can see each skill takes a certian number of skill points to unlock, I feel that an initial skill costing 2 points to unlock is very steep and in order to unlock skills further down the board you have to buy skills above it. I do not know if it is possible to unlock all the talents if you play enough or if you can even reset the skill tree.



Other units have a level of trust with the main hero. As you play along you can interact with the units to unlock stronger permanent bonuses for that character. Each one of these seem to take a unique resource to open up thes bonuses.


The ever growing need to find all the rarest equipment you can cram on a unit and then having to upgrade all of those pieces for even more stats. This game has several set bonuses from armors that all fall into that same set. This makes it even more complicated to find the right equipment for each unit to use.



Lastly, there is a special gotcha that you can roll to try to get rarer units easier but it takes a lot of a harder to obtain resource. These seem to be weekly events that change up and I do not know if these have improved rates or not.

Overall:


 1 of 5 cogs.



Overall, I am not happy with how this kind of game is contstructed. There are no ads but there are so many paywalls where you have to pay just to even catch up with other players. It is only possible to catch up with a lot of grinding and hoping all the top players become inactive long enough for you to close gap. There are many flawed things with this style of game that just leads to toxicity. I've had many bad experiences with this kind of game, that is more akin to gambling disguised as a game.

Story:
 3 of 5 cogs.

There's a fair bit of story as you progress through the story. There is an attempt at some comedy but it just doesn't rub well with me.

Amount of ads:
 

 None, there are no Ads because of the heavy paywalls.







Accurate Advertising?:
75%

I've seen several ads for this game and none of them were accurate enough to show this game is just a clone of AFK Arena. The ads made me think this game would be a different kind of idle game but no it was severely disappointing.

Graphics:

 5 of 5 cogs.


Arguably the best part of the game. All the art is HD and packs quite the punch to the storage of your phone.

Gameplay:
 1 of 5 cogs.

What else can I say? I was highly disappointed by this game. I was expecting something different and instead it was a carbon-copy of other types of games just like it that have many flawed systems designed to steal money from your wallet. The odds of getting decent troops would equate to lot of money to keep rolling gotchas. 

Free play:
10%

Just, no. This game is not very kind to f2p gamers. This game has many traps to make you spend large amounts of money with little to no actual value in return.

Fun factor:
😔 Disappointed.

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