Hello Time Wasters!
It finally happened. My faithful old phone died. Being that I was in the market for a new phone, I figured I might as well upgrade to a smartphone. That being said, a whole world of cheap new games just opened up to me.
My first adventure into smartphone games is called Rage of Bahamut. It’s a card game RPG filled with over one million players and a vast amount of cards to choose from, kind of. The card part of Rage of Bahamut is a lie; it’s really just an RPG with a card game skin (which was really disappointing to me as a trading card game enthusiast).
The game starts you out with the basic tutorial and then draws you in with the simple but addicting gameplay. It’s so simple to play. In fact, having the world be more casual is more fitting. Battles are as easy as tapping the screen to win, and the only real depth comes from the ability to evolve your monsters, which is done using the cards.
For example, let’s say you have two Goblin cards. Combine them together, or ‘evolve’ them as the game puts it, and you come out with a stronger version of your Goblin. Adding to this is the ability to level up cards as well by sacrificing other cards to do it. The whole system is relatively simple, but when you only have a few minutes to play it’s a great way to make the time pass.
Like most free-to-play games, Rage of Bahamut runs off the whole ‘play a little for free’ and ‘pay to play more’ system. So while the game is free, to play it’s really only free for five to ten minutes before you either have to wait for a certain period of time, or start dropping the real dough.
The presentation of Rage of Bahamut does exactly what it’s suppose to, it distracts you from the shallow repetitive gameplay and drags you in to the point that you want to drop the real money just to reach that next ‘high’ of completing a quest or leveling up. Good graphics and flashy animations are always a sure fire way to win over the gaming populace.
Audio on the other hand is missing entirely. No dramatic slashing sound when you kill an enemy or tune of achievement when leveling up. Sure it’s great when you want to play incognito (aka John and Nate are roaming around the cubicles) but it leaves something to be desired in the silence of your own home.
Wrapping this up, Rage of Bahamut is a fun and overly addicting game despite how shallow it is. With nice flashy graphics to distract, and the skin of a card game to throw off the non-RPG savvy, it seems like I shouldn’t like it as much as I do. Then I find myself checking back every hour or so to do more quests and level up more cards.
Rage of Bahamut earns a solid 4 GiN gems out of 5!