Niche Plays: Mobile Medley

Hey, it's Mulukh back again for this week and despite a crazy backlog on actual console I seem to have spent my time on free-to-play mobile games this week. I only usually have time to focus on one mobile game at a time, this week I have 3 to tell you about...

Avengers Academy

Check out the brand new and minty fresh Niche: Treat Your Geek Issue 12 for my full review, but suffice to say I am STILL playing this game. Currently there's a Spider-man themed event going on. It adds a little bit of new gameplay and missions to complete plus plenty more opportunities to empty your wallet with in-game purchases. If you want to get involved there is enough time for you to level up to qualify for the event and attempt to unlock Spider-man and premium character, Spider-Ham. There's also the chance to unlock Black Cat and Mary Jane. Later you'll have a shot at Doc Oc and if you do well with the event and you'll earn Green Goblin, however "doing well" tends to require spending some real life money.

Dragon Ball Z Dokkan Battle

Turns out this game has been out for a year and I never knew. This one year anniversary plus a total of 7.777 million downloads means there's a tonne of celebratory freebies right now, there's never been a better time to join in. The screenshots on the app store make it look like some kind of rhythm game but the core gameplay is actually a twist on colour matching games, you pick from the first row of power orbs and any adjacent orbs of the same colour will also "pop". The more orbs you gather the more your characters power up, dealing more damage, power up enough and unleash a devastating  special attack. The gameplay does get more tactical and challenging as each class has strengths and weaknesses, choosing the right team member to guard against an impending target is crucial to your survival.

The game does a great job of capturing the spirit of the anime, battles play out in a frenetic exciting fashion, special attacks are suitably epic and iconic, they even power up even further once the Dokkan gauge is full. All the patient powering up feels really appropriate to the universe. Upgrading and levelling your cards ties in nicely with the constant training and evolving power levels of the show. All of this plus familiar characters and locations and being able to collect capsules and the ever rewarding dragon balls.

Somehow most of the characters I started with felt really powerful, pick up some super rare characters (maybe a Super Saiyan God?) and they feel just as overpowered as you'd hope. If you're worried about this making the game too easy, have no fear, 3 levels of difficulty are here.
Story missions follow an original plot but borrow elements from the anime, the writing isn't an amazing adaptation but it does a fair job of summarising plot points. There's a host of daily, weekly and special events to keep you going.

Final Fantasy Brave Exvius

Brand new this week I haven't been able to sink a lot of time on this one, but I wanted to share what I have found so far. This game seems to build on Final Fantasy Record Keeper. Exvius has taken the concept of recruiting heroes from other games in the franchise, but returned to FF's roots with RPG gameplay and a full story mode (featuring elemental crystals being destroyed).

The graphics and sound are another step up, inspired by the 16bit graphics of yore but much more refined, the opening cutscene was not something I expected from a mobile game and some graphical elements look to be high quality HD.

At first the turn based battle mechanism seemed super simple, but actually appears to be an ingenious solution to fitting RPG battle menus onto a mobile device. At first it is as simple as clicking on a character's tag to attack, but then you learn that swiping in different directions brings you to magic and other skills. It'll be a while before I can get a full review together but I thought I'd give a heads up in case you have an interest in playing a new classic Final Fantasy on mobile, go give it a go!