Friday, June 27, 2014

Master of Craft

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/master-of-craft/id883564008?mt=8
Free, universal, 54mb download, no gamecenter.

Thoughts
Well this is actually entertaining. Monsters are invading the kingdom all over the place, the capital city and immediately nearby towns are safe due to their resources available and location. They've developed the technology to make impressive monster killing weapons and are doing it effectively. The problem is the capitals ability to defend everyone is finite and unfortunately many smaller villages on the outskirts of the kingdom are suffering pretty bad.

The king resolves this by sending volunteer engineers out to these far away villages. The goal is to teach the village to defend itself, to produce weapons and armor. Doing so will attract heroes who do the fighting for the villages. You are the engineer, you arrive to a basic little meh of a thing called a village. And its your job to make it awesome!





I've seen alot of games over the years that take the perspective of the merchant supplying the heroes. In fact I remember the very very first time I encountered such a game, Dragon Warrior(Quest) 4. The game was divided in to 5 chapters, 4 of which each involved separate characters and the 5th chapter was when everyone came together. Chapter 3 you played Taloon, a merchant. There was questing and adventuring and killing out there but 90% of your time with him was spent behind a counter selling weapons to adventurers and buying stuff they looted.

This game really is bringing back the nostalgia heh.

So, keeping on track here. You have production buildings such as the saw mill. You produce crafting materials from these buildings and more automatically appear in your town as the town grows in size (keep leveling up, it happens automatically). These production buildings can also be upgraded to produce rarer materials needed to make better equipment.

You take these crafted materials to the shops, such as the Warrior shop and turn the materials in to weapons and armor for local adventurers who frequently appear and wander around your town. They buy your wares, you make money and experience and life is good. You spend the gold on more equipment to sell, you spend it on upgrading your buildings, etc.

Production of resources and equipment generate experience, experience levels you up, awards you iap gems from time to time and automatically the town gets bigger and more buildings become available for you to make use of.

On top of this economic aspect of the game there is actual adventure/combat to be had as well. At the Master House you can build rare weapons (which require rare crafting materials gained occasionally from questing but also from the iap shop if you so care). These rare weapons are not handled like normal equipment from the warrior shop, these are equipped on actual heroes that you can take in to combat at the Guild. Combat is straight forward, your heroes run across the screen smacking everything they see. You use their special abilities as often as off cooldown and eventually a big boss shows up. You kill it, receive harder to find crafting materials and over all just feel good about protecting the town. Using the guild to go in to combat requires a energy resource, that is only generated by making normal equipment at your shop. Nice tie in and since you always want to be producing/selling things its a good link. There appears to be three heroe types. Warrior, Archer and Mage.

Facebook appears to be the only method of friend connections though it is decent that you can trade resources with your friends. You can bring your friends heroes along however on your battles.

Everything feels really well tied in to eachother. Have to produce equipment to battle, Have to battle to get the harder to get materials to produce better equipment. Oh and the local adventurers are messy, have to clean up their trash heh.

So far, this is definitely an amusing title and aside from the iap packs I've really no complaints. Well, not really complaining about those either since  I havent been forced in their direction at all yet. I'm currently level 5, I have the sawmill, steel mill resource producers, the warrior shop for equipment, the master shop for my heroes equipment and the guild. Both my producers are level 2 now. I got my clock creamed on the third guild combat stage, going to grind for abit and see if better equipment or heroes show up so that its not just my one warrior doing all the work heh.











Good game, check it out!

o7

1 comment:

taeles said...

Note : I'm going to definitely have to do a followup to this game, a whole LOT of things unlock at level 7 which I hit about 5 minutes after I posted this article heh.