Overall I enjoy the game. It’s fun and definitely one of those games to play on the side when work is slow or you’re just bored. Like most app games you blast off making progress and then you hit the wall. At first your limited to the number of buildings you can repeat building until you hit the Mionian Era then you can build unlimited of the same building. But then you’re severely limited to the space and that is what really takes a while. You gain territory by advancing the story which is fun and once you conquer a region you get another land expansion. As you gain more expansions it takes longer and longer for it to fully develop unless you spend gems. Now as you get further you gain more heroes, expect a LOT of repeats. You then use those copies to level up the original. That’s not too bad. However, to get the higher quality star heroes is a real grind in of itself. So be ready to be okay with staying in an area for a while grinding it out to be strong enough to advance. Leveling up your heroes isn’t too bad. There are missions if you have the auto resolve tickets you can spam it and get the XP to level up your heroes then you have to grind it out in the Tesla Storm to get the advance materials to raise their level cap. Just to recap, fun game, plenty to do, bit of a grind.

It’s true you can play for free, but any progression beyond a snail’s pace (this makes a snail look fast) requires money. The fact that there is so much to do is both good and bad. This game is unusual in that you really need to progress a lot of your heroes. You can’t rely only a few. And progressing them is agonizing. This leads to one of the biggest problems with the way things work. Equipment. You need Embers to progress equipment Not only is gathering them slow, but each attempt to Level Up has a probability which decreases as you go up. A super frustrating thing is that by level 8 you are down to “Medium”. Wouldn’t you think “medium” is about 50% more or less. My experience over dozens of attempts is that it is way less. I have frequently had 6 or more straight failures at Medium. This process is enough to make you want to throw your device against a wall. One other major flaw is how often necessary stats are not immediately displayed where needed, but you have to back out to find them. The worst I’ve seen is when battling and you temporarily run out of stamina, a pop up offers you two methods to replenish (including spending gems) but there is no display of how much you need so you can’t make an intelligent choice. Finally, connectivity is fragile. The game crashes multiple times per day, often in the middle of a long battle. I have had this in multiple wifi locations on multiple devices.

This game is fun, but the MASSIVE downfall of it is that it is as pay-to-win as you can possibly get. For instance, you are extremely limited on the amount of buildings you can have, making you stuck with a fixed amount of population, which prevents you from producing your required resources, “solving” incidents, and upgrading everything you need to. You’re also limited on the upgrading slots unless you pay for the monthly game pass. With the side events like Egypt and China, which are just incredibly fun and addicting because there are no upgrading slot limitations, and the upgrades are much quicker than the regular ones, it is just still impossible to progress in the event unless you pay money. There’s a max rank of 50, and for me and my alliance members, without spending money and spending almost all amount of our time on the event, none of us could even get halfway, reducing our reward payouts to “bronze.” The special currency, gems, are very few and far between to achieve through free-to-play means. And the gacha system, “portals,” are even worse. The pity system that’s implemented is only after 200 pulls you are guaranteed a legendary hero. You can pay $30 PER WEEK to get 24 regular portals. There’s also a legendary portal pull where you’re guaranteed a legendary hero after 20 pulls, but those portals you can’t even receive in normal means. If you’re lucky, you can get 1 legendary portal fragment from rare means, needing 20 fragments to form one legendary portal. I’ve played other Innogames in the past and I’ve enjoyed all of them. But this one is just absolutely impossible if you don’t pay money.

I just uninstalled after playing for a few days. There’s a lot of missing details and things that go unexplained. You need to “level up” your heroes so that you can advance through the map so that you can acquire land expansions/resources for the village you’re building. But there’s no explanations as to which heroes would be best to “level up”, so then you waste resources leveling up your heroes. The Tesla Storm became impossible to beat on level 5 purple, because I only had two purple heroes (something completely out of my control) and one of those purple heroes had a low fighting level due to limited resources to level them up. I summoned the same “hero” three different times? Some random jungle man who I didn’t recognize. They show very historic figures like Joan of Arc and Abe Lincoln.. and you think you’re going to be able to utilize these characters but instead you get the same random jungle man three different times. Found myself stuck and unable to advance through the game due to lack of resources to power up my heroes, leading to lack of resources to grow my village. And was in a bit of standstill. The game started off interesting the first hour I played it, but it wasn’t long before I was in a standstill due to events out of my control.