Tap Dragon Park
Jun. 15th, 2012 05:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroA classic “make the numbers go up” casual game for Android devices. You are charged with defending the kingdom’s treasure pile by raising dragons to fight off the trolls that come attack it. It’s a little bit Pokémon, a little bit SimCity, and a lot like Farmville or, for us old-school types, having a Tamagatchi.
It’s time-based gaming, which means that every action takes real time: Training dragons, hatching dragons, breeding (“mixing”) dragons, expanding your empire, and recovering after battle all takes real time. The idea is to get you playing for a few minutes several times a day, or to get you frustrated enough to spend jewels to expedite the process. But jewels aren’t available via gameplay at all, you need to trade real money for them.
Similarly, the currency that is available via gameplay, gold, goes through waves of being in short supply (in the very early game, when you have very few dragons generating it but you have a lot of new dragons, training, expansion and furniture items to spend it on) to being nearly useless (when you’re out of dragons to buy or breed until you increase in level, and are generating far more than you need to train dragons in the time it takes to train them).
This is, of course, entirely intentional. The game is free, but Pocket Gems needs to make more in order to produce games. So it’s kinda like the old-school freeware model, where you can get the basic game functionality for free and need to pay for the full version, combined with the ability to trade money for patience. The dragons you can buy with jewels are much more badass than the gold-only ones. You need jewels to unlock a second wizard to train multiple dragons at a time. The more you get into the game, the more it can potentially cost you in easy $2 increments. Similarly, the time-bound nature is helped along by the game pushing alerts to your phone whenever there’s something worth returning to check on—it trains you to log in every few hours to collect gold and set a new dragon hatching or training. I find this both devious and brilliant.
Battles are generated pretty much constantly, but you can ignore them, too. Winning them earns you battle point, which appear to be related to the size of the walls surrounding your treasure pile and the strength of the monsters generated. Battles feature three of your dragons versus one troll in three rounds of combat. The troll plays an element (fire, water or earth), each dragon has an innate element, and there’s a classic rock-paper-scissors comparison. The winner of that gets an “element bonus”, the side with the higher level gets a “level bonus” (which pretty much breaks ties between elements) and one side may be randomly assigned a “battle bonus” (which breaks further ties). These are only slightly strategy-based (what dragons you bring into combat, looking at the elemental trump wheel when you play a dragon) and are mostly luck-based beyond that.
The game’s achievements are collections of short quests intended to keep you moving along in the game: Gathering trash, breeding the latest dragon and training them up, hiring a new wizard, etc etc. Fitting for the setting and game style, but nothing that would earn you gamerpoints.
Overall: If you’re patient, it’s a cute little time-waster if you like two-minute phone-based gaming breaks and the satisfaction of a growing empire. If you lack patience and/or are a completist, you could blow a ton of money on this. In three weeks of playing I’ve probably only put in two hours of active playtime, and I think I’ve seen about everything noteworthy that I can for free.
Disclosure: I was introduced to this by a friend who works at Pocket Gems, the folks who made the game.
It’s time-based gaming, which means that every action takes real time: Training dragons, hatching dragons, breeding (“mixing”) dragons, expanding your empire, and recovering after battle all takes real time. The idea is to get you playing for a few minutes several times a day, or to get you frustrated enough to spend jewels to expedite the process. But jewels aren’t available via gameplay at all, you need to trade real money for them.
Similarly, the currency that is available via gameplay, gold, goes through waves of being in short supply (in the very early game, when you have very few dragons generating it but you have a lot of new dragons, training, expansion and furniture items to spend it on) to being nearly useless (when you’re out of dragons to buy or breed until you increase in level, and are generating far more than you need to train dragons in the time it takes to train them).
This is, of course, entirely intentional. The game is free, but Pocket Gems needs to make more in order to produce games. So it’s kinda like the old-school freeware model, where you can get the basic game functionality for free and need to pay for the full version, combined with the ability to trade money for patience. The dragons you can buy with jewels are much more badass than the gold-only ones. You need jewels to unlock a second wizard to train multiple dragons at a time. The more you get into the game, the more it can potentially cost you in easy $2 increments. Similarly, the time-bound nature is helped along by the game pushing alerts to your phone whenever there’s something worth returning to check on—it trains you to log in every few hours to collect gold and set a new dragon hatching or training. I find this both devious and brilliant.
Battles are generated pretty much constantly, but you can ignore them, too. Winning them earns you battle point, which appear to be related to the size of the walls surrounding your treasure pile and the strength of the monsters generated. Battles feature three of your dragons versus one troll in three rounds of combat. The troll plays an element (fire, water or earth), each dragon has an innate element, and there’s a classic rock-paper-scissors comparison. The winner of that gets an “element bonus”, the side with the higher level gets a “level bonus” (which pretty much breaks ties between elements) and one side may be randomly assigned a “battle bonus” (which breaks further ties). These are only slightly strategy-based (what dragons you bring into combat, looking at the elemental trump wheel when you play a dragon) and are mostly luck-based beyond that.
The game’s achievements are collections of short quests intended to keep you moving along in the game: Gathering trash, breeding the latest dragon and training them up, hiring a new wizard, etc etc. Fitting for the setting and game style, but nothing that would earn you gamerpoints.
Overall: If you’re patient, it’s a cute little time-waster if you like two-minute phone-based gaming breaks and the satisfaction of a growing empire. If you lack patience and/or are a completist, you could blow a ton of money on this. In three weeks of playing I’ve probably only put in two hours of active playtime, and I think I’ve seen about everything noteworthy that I can for free.
Disclosure: I was introduced to this by a friend who works at Pocket Gems, the folks who made the game.
