There is a stamina meter which depletes every time you attempt a battle that refills over time or can be topped off by paying. If you’re not interested in paying a cent for this game’s concept, Swords And Poker Adventures will serve you just fine, albeit with the usual free-to-play conceits. It has a couple of very direct competitors in its own ancestors, which remain quite playable to this day and lack any sort of monetization at all beyond the initial purchase price. Unfortunately, this game doesn’t exist in a vacuum. In a vacuum, this is an excellent game that I would certainly recommend to any puzzle or card game fan. The production values have been buffed up to the level you would expect from a major publisher like Konami, representing a major step up from the somewhat mundane presentation of the earlier installments. The core gameplay remains intact, the difficulty curve isn’t quite as steep as you would usually find in this type of pay model, and you can even permanently buy your way out of the obligatory stamina meter for the very reasonable price of $4.99. Swords And Poker Adventures is a good game, and as free-to-play puzzle games go, a very generous one. The end result is a complicated situation that I imagine few will be happy with. They also seem to be okay with the previous two games still being available on the App Store, since both are purchasable at present. If it weren’t hard enough to take over development on a beloved grassroots hit series, Konami perhaps saw the way the wind was blowing and opted to make their first Sword And Poker game free-to-play in the vein of major hits like Candy Crush Saga (Free). It was enough to ensure that Gaia would release Sword And Poker 2 ($3.99), but apparently not enough to save the company, as they went dark soon after. The original game, created in what would be the twilight years of Shin Megami Tensei ($7.99) creator Cozy Okada’s start-up developer Gaia, proved to be a major hit in Japan, with decent success worldwide. Swords And Poker Adventures (Free) is the latest installment in the Sword And Poker ($2.99) series and the first developed under new owners Konami. Of course, one approach a publisher can take is to pull the previous games in the series, artificially shunting people to whichever version you want them to go to, but outside of that, it can be a minefield, as the creators of Dungelot ($0.99) found earlier this year with the initial blowback from Dungelot 2 (Free). Did anyone really go in for Tetris 2? People are often happy with good puzzle games as they are. In the case of a puzzle game, however, it’s often hard to get people to buy into a sequel even without changing the deal much. Some types of games have it easier than others, since certain genres almost demand improved visuals and major content updates as time goes by. Generally speaking, the upfront price tag ends up being the main advantage a free-to-play game can tout, with its paid predecessors usually offering a better longterm value for more frequent players. When it comes to the games business, I’m not sure if there’s any task that offers quite the same challenges as trying to convert a series from premium to free-to-play.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |